Italian media is reporting that Pope Francis has once again used a slang term against gay people in a closed-door meeting, just weeks after issuing an apology for using the same phrase in another meeting.
ANSA news agency reported that the Pope repeated the slur as he told a group of Italian priests on Tuesday that “there is an air of faggotry in the Vatican” and that it was better that young men inclined towards homosexuality not be allowed to enter the seminary.
When asked by media about the latest report, the Vatican’s press office referenced a statement it had issued after the meeting in which the Pope expressed a welcoming attitude towards gay people.
It was previously reported that Francis told a May 20 closed-door meeting of Italian bishops not to allow gay men to train for the priesthood, with two Italian newspapers reporting at the time that the Pope had used Italian slang for homosexuals during the course of the conversation.
Citing sources who had attended the meeting, the Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica newspapers claimed that the 87-year-old Pontiff had said there is “frociaggine” – which translates in English to “faggotry” – in some of the seminaries.
The initial comments took place in the context of proposals from Italian bishops to make changes to guidelines on candidates to seminaries.
In his comments to the bishops, Francis voiced what had been the Church’s official position since 2005, when the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education issued a document on the topic, approved by Pope Benedict XVI, which ruled that that the Church cannot allow the ordination of men who are actively gay or have “deep-seated” homosexual tendencies.
Pope Francis endorsed the same document three years into his pontificate in 2016.
Following the initial reports, the Vatican issued a statement saying that the Pope “never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he extends his apologies to those who felt offended by the use of a term”.
“As he (Pope Francis) has said on several occasions, ‘in the Church there is room for everyone, everyone! No one is useless, no one is superfluous, there is room for everyone. Just as we are, everyone’.”