Pope Francis repeated an anti-gay slur during a meeting with priests in Rome on Tuesday, Italian news outlets reported, the same offensive term he was accused of using two weeks ago.
The Vatican, in summarizing the gathering, said only that the pontiff had cautioned about admitting gay men into Roman Catholic seminaries.
The Vatican did not address the reports by two of the most prominent news agencies in Italy, ANSA and Adnkronos, that he had again used an offensive Italian slang term referring to gay men. The reports cited anonymous sources they said had been present at the meeting.
Francesco Langella, the director of communications for the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome, where the meeting took place, confirmed that the pope repeated the slang word.
He did not provide additional information about the context in which it was used, and the exact circumstances remained unclear.
The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported on Wednesday that he had used the term in relating the words of a bishop. “A bishop came to me and told me, ‘There is too much frociaggine here in the Vatican,’” the newspaper reported the pope as saying.
A spokesperson for the Vatican declined to comment.
Francis was accused of using the same term last month at a private meeting with Italian bishops, according to several people present at the meeting who spoke anonymously to the Italian news media.
Francis had been taking questions from a meeting of bishops when the question of whether to admit openly gay men into seminaries came up, Italian news outlets reported. They wrote that Francis answered no, and used the slur in describing what he considered as an excess of gay men at the priests’ colleges.
Those reports ignited widespread backlash and drew an apology from the pope, issued through the director of the Holy See’s press office, who said: “The pope never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he extends his apologies to those who were offended by the use of a term, reported by others.”
Vatican News, the Holy See’s online news site, said in its summary of the meeting that the pope “spoke about the danger of ideologies in the church” and reiterated that while the church should welcome people “with homosexual tendencies,” it should exercise “prudence” in admitting them into seminaries.
The Vatican said the closed-door meeting had also addressed “pastoral” and “current” themes, like substance abuse, low voter turnout in elections, and the wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere.
Francis has been widely credited with making moves to welcome L.G.B.T.Q. people in the Roman Catholic Church, delivering a mostly inclusive message and deciding to allow priests to bless same-sex couples.
But the previous reports about the pope’s use of the homophobic slur upset and alienated some L.G.B.T.Q. people within and outside the church.
After the reports in May, a gay priest wrote in America magazine, a Jesuit publication, that he was “shocked and saddened” by the remarks and added, “We need more than an apology for Pope Francis’ homophobic slur.”
The Italian politician Alessandro Zan, who is gay and a prominent champion for L.G.B.T.Q. people, wrote on social media then: “There is not too much ‘frociaggine.’ There are too many homophobes.”
Content Source: www.nytimes.com