Pope Francis formally signed off on allowing Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples in December 2023.
But decades before the pope’s historic announcement, a New York City church has embraced the LGBTQ+ community and provided a safe space for worship.
The Church of St. Francis Xavier, in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, provided services for AIDS patients while others refused, including being one of the first to bury a person who died of the virus during the epidemic of the 1980s. More recently, the church became the new home for a decadeslong memorial for people who died from AIDS-related complications when the original host parish was closed as part of the Archdiocese of New York’s reorganization plans.
“We came and we never left,” Roe Sauerzopf told ABC News Live, recalling the first time she and her wife, Paula Acuti, had attended Sunday Mass at St. Francis, and how they immediately felt “safe” to be themselves.
“It’s been a struggle to be a lesbian, and to be a Catholic lesbian has been even more of a struggle,” Acuti, a New York resident, shared with a room full of women who attend a Catholic Lesbian group at the church and can relate to her experience, all nodding in agreement, while eating cheese and crackers and sipping wine on a Friday night.
“I had left the Catholic Church because of the attitude toward gay people,” Sauerzopf added.
“It was on Pride Sunday and the priest said that everybody there should pray for all the sinners who were marching in the city. And I think that’s the last time that we went into a church for a long time,” Acuti told ABC News Live.
It was at least 15 years before the couple found their way back to the Catholic Church. When attending a friend’s wedding in the early 2000s, they shared with a straight couple that they had felt unaccepted to be themselves within their religion.
“We were complaining to them about how there really is no accepting Catholic churches and they were like ‘oh no, there is one,’” Acuti said.
That’s when Acuti and Sauerzopf found St. Francis Xavier.
They soon became involved in the parish’s Catholic Lesbian group, which was founded in 1995, and now has more than 300 participating members.
Pastor Kenneth Boller, who leads the LGBTQ+ friendly groups at the church, said the parish has been welcoming of all people for “many, many years.”
“It’s important for everybody to find groups of people who are ‘like’ instead of ‘other.’ So you can develop friendships, you can share experiences,” Boller said. “What’s important is that people find a place to pray.”
The Catholic Lesbians group meets monthly to pray together and share their own faith experiences. With a wide range of ages, the youngest member is 18 years old and the oldest members are in their 80s.
Acuti and Sauerzopf, who have been together for 45 years, got married at St. Francis Xavier in 2004, when same-sex marriage was still illegal in the United States.
Sauerzopf said the ceremony was for their 25th anniversary, and the priest at the time told them to invite their family and friends.
“He did a whole Mass, he blessed our rings, he just couldn’t sign the papers.”
It was a day the couple said they’d never forget. Wanting other same-sex couples to feel the acceptance they had received, they helped plan a surprise ceremony at a recent Catholic Lesbian retreat for a newlywed couple who joined the group during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“They’re just the most welcoming group we found,” McKenna Coyle, who is in her 20s, said, describing the group as “family.”
It was the last day of the retreat when Coyle and her wife, who were celebrating their one-year anniversary, walked into a room with music playing, a cake and photos from their wedding day displayed.
“They blessed us to celebrate our wedding since we can’t get married in the Catholic Church,” Coyle said.
“It’s a blessing on persons because everyone, every person, is entitled to be blessed. It’s not a blessing or endorsement of their living situation, but a realization that these are people of goodwill,” Boller said, in describing the Vatican policy change.
“The Pope says all are welcome. But then he kind of backtracks a little,” Sauerzopf said. “But this church doesn’t do the backtrack. They keep it up.”
In addition to advocating for equality within the Catholic Church, Sauerzopf also said she would like to see more women in leadership roles within the church. The Church of St. Francis Xavier allows women to perform the homily during Mass, Sauerzopf said, which is rare within the Catholic religion.
“We shouldn’t be the oasis. We should be what it’s all like,” she said, while sitting in a church pew.
The Pope’s reported use of derogatory language about gay people has been branded “disappointing” by a London-based LGBT+ Catholic group.
Italian media reported that Pope Francis used the term “frociaggine” when answering no to a question on whether gay men should be admitted to seminaries to train for the priesthood.
The Vatican has not commented on the remark – believed to translate to an offensive slur – reported to have been made in a meeting behind closed doors earlier this month.
If it is as it has been reported it is offensive. I think it is disappointing. He should be more careful about how he phrases things, particularly in these kind of off-the-cuff remarks
— Martin Pendergast, LGBT+ Catholics Westminster
Martin Pendergast, secretary of LGBT+ Catholics Westminster Pastoral Council, told the PA news agency: “If it is as it has been reported it is offensive. I think it is disappointing. He should be more careful about how he phrases things, particularly in these kind of off-the-cuff remarks.
“I think he tends to use these slang words without understanding the ramifications they can have.”
But, asked whether he feels the remark will be a step back for relations for the church and its gay members, Mr Pendergast replied “certainly not” and questioned the way in which the comment had emerged from the private meeting.
He said: “I just wonder what the rationale was for whoever released this to the media – was it used to weaponise against the Pope’s more consistent LGBT+ welcoming approach?
“It would have been better to have challenged the comment within the meeting (rather than leaking it).”
Asked about the comment, a spokesman from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW) said: “Echoing the consistent message of the Synod and this papacy, the Catholic Church is a place of welcome for all.”
In 2013, Pope Francis was reported to have indicated he would not judge priests for their sexual orientation, saying: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”<
In December last year he formally approved allowing priests to bless same-sex couples, as long as such blessings do not give the impression of a marriage ceremony, reversing a 2021 policy by the Vatican’s doctrine office, which barred such blessings on the grounds that God “does not and cannot bless sin”.
🌈 🙏”Making the impossible, possible”
“25 years ago we changed the world, slightly.”
These were the words that we heard at our 25th anniversary conference, marking 25 years from the date of the first masses welcoming LGBT+ Catholics in a little convent church in Islington. pic.twitter.com/39iJnE2Q70
— LGBT+ Catholics Westminster (@LGBTCathWestmin) May 27, 2024
The Pope’s most recent reported comment came as LGBT+ Catholics Westminster marked its 25th anniversary, with a celebratory Mass on Sunday.
Bishop Paul McAleenan, who is Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster and was representing Cardinal Vincent Nichols at the service, told those gathered that the church “must never be closed, it must always be a church that includes and makes room for all”.
He thanked the LGBT+ group for its “value” and “contribution to the life of the church”.
Lawyer Laura Sgro’, left, talks to Mirjam Kovac, center, and Gloria Branciani, as they arrive for an interview with the Associated Press, in Rome, Friday, June 28, 2024. Kovac and Branciani are two of five women who urged Catholic bishops around the world to remove from their churches mosaics by ex-Jesuit artist Rev. Marko Rupnik after they accused him of psychologically, spiritually and sexually abusing them.
By NICOLE WINFIELD
The scandal over a famous ex-Jesuit artist who is accused of psychologically, spiritually and sexually abusing adult women came to a head Friday after some of his alleged victims and the pope’s own anti-abuse adviser asked for his artworks not to be promoted or displayed.
The separate initiatives underscored how the case of the Rev. Marko Rupnik, whose mosaics grace some of the Catholic Church’s most-visited shrines and sanctuaries, continues to cause a headache for the Vatican and Pope Francis, who as a Jesuit himself has been drawn into the scandal.
Early Friday, five women who say they were abused by Rupnik sent letters to Catholic bishops around the world asking them to remove his mosaics from their churches, saying their continued display in places of worship was “inappropriate” and retraumatizing to victims.
Separately, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, head of the pope’s Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, sent his own letter urging Vatican offices to stop displaying Rupnik’s works. He said continued use of the works ignores the pain of victims and could imply a defense of the Slovene priest.
The two-pronged messages were issued after the Vatican’s top communications official strongly defended using images of Rupnik artwork on the Vatican News website, insisting that it caused no harm to victims and was a Christian response.
The Rupnik scandal first exploded publicly in late 2022 when the Jesuit religious order admitted that he had been excommunicated briefly for having committed one of the Catholic Church’s most serious crimes: using the confessional to absolve a woman with whom he had engaged in sexual activity.
The case continued to create problems for the Jesuits and Francis, since a dozen more women came forward saying they too had been victimized by Rupnik. The Vatican initially refused to prosecute, arguing the claims were too old.
Nevertheless, after hearing from more victims, the Jesuits expelled Rupnik from the order and Francis — under pressure because of suspicions he had protected his fellow Jesuit — waived the statute of limitations so that the Vatican could open a proper canonical trial.
To date Rupnik hasn’t responded publicly to the allegations and refused to respond to his Jesuit superiors during their investigation. His supporters at his Centro Aletti art studio have denounced what they have called a media “lynching.”
The debate about what to do with Rupnik’s works as the Vatican trial into him continues isn’t so much a matter of “cancel culture” or the age-old debate about whether one can appreciate art, such as a Caravaggio, separately from the actions of the artist. The reason is because some of Rupnik’s alleged victims say the abuse occurred precisely during the creation of the artwork itself, rendering the resulting mosaics a triggering and traumatic reminder of what they endured.
One nun said she was abused on the scaffolding as a mosaic was being installed in a church, another as she posed as his model.
“Notwithstanding the years that have passed, the trauma that each suffered has not been erased, and it lives again in the presence of each of Father Rupnik’s works,” said their letter, which was signed by attorney Laura Sgro on behalf of her five clients and sent Friday to more than 100 bishops, Vatican embassies and religious superiors around the world who are known to have Rupnik mosaics in their territories.
Gloria Branciani, one of the first Rupnik victims to go public, said she long wrestled with the question of what to do with his mosaics. But in an interview Friday, she said she came to the conclusion they must be removed from places of worship after learning that other women had been abused precisely in their creation.
“This doesn’t mean destroy the work, it means it can be moved somewhere else,” she said in an interview Friday. “The important thing is that it not remain connected to the expression of people’s faith … because using a work that is borne from an inspiration of abuse cannot remain in a place where people go to pray.”
The Vatican trial against Rupnik is ongoing — Sgro says she hasn’t been contacted to provide testimony of her clients — and Rupnik’s many defenders in the Vatican and beyond say it’s important to withhold final judgment until the Vatican makes its ruling.
But the scandal came back to life last week when the head of the Vatican’s communications department, Paolo Ruffini, was asked at a Catholic media conference why the Vatican News website continues to feature an image of a Rupnik mosaic.
Ruffini defended using the image, saying he was in no position to judge Rupnik and that in the history of civilization, “removing, deleting or destroying art has never been a good choice.”
When it was pointed out that he hadn’t mentioned the impact on victims of seeing Rupnik’s artwork promoted by the Vatican, Ruffini noted that the women weren’t minors and that while “closeness to the victims is important, I don’t know that this (removing the artwork) is the way of healing.”
When the reporter, Paulina Guziak of Our Sunday Visitor News, suggested otherwise, Ruffini said: “I think you’re wrong. I think you’re wrong. I really think you’re wrong.”
His comments shocked victims and apparently prompted O’Malley to send a letter to all Vatican offices saying he hoped that “pastoral prudence would prevent displaying artwork in a way that could imply either exoneration or a subtle defense” of alleged perpetrators of abuse.
“We must avoid sending a message that the Holy See is oblivious to the psychological distress that so many are suffering,” O’Malley wrote on behalf of the commission June 26.
The women who wrote their own letter said they greatly appreciated O’Malley’s statement, which they took as a show of support that came as a pleasant and unexpected surprise.
“It’s a sign that the times have matured,” said Mirjam Kovac, a Slovene canon lawyer at the Pontifical Gregorian University who is a former member of Rupnik’s community.
Sister Samuelle, a French nun who says Rupnik manipulated her over years, taking advantage of her vulnerability to eventually touch her intimately while on a mosaic installation scaffolding, thanked O’Malley “from my heart.”
“In this difficult, weighty and traumatic situation, we took this important step with our letter. And I receive his declaration as a sign that there’s someone else who cares,” she said in an interview.
For advocates of victims, the Rupnik scandal and Ruffini’s comments were continued evidence that the church in general, and Vatican in particular, continually dismiss abuse of adult women as mere sinful behavior by priests rather than traumatic abuse that affects them for life.
“The continued use of Rupnik’s art is incredibly hurtful to many abuse survivors, who see this as emblematic of an ongoing lack of concern for the needs of all survivors,” Sara Larson, executive director of Awake, a survivor support and advocacy organization, said in an email.
Removal of the mosaics, however, is no simple matter since some cover entire basilica façades (Lourdes, France); entire interiors (the Vatican’s own Redemptoris Mater chapel); or, in the case of the St. Padre Pio sanctuary in southern Italy, the entire floor-to-ceiling gilded smaller church.
Other churches have smaller-scale mosaics but they are still prominent. The Rupnik-designed mosaics inside the Basilica of the Holy Trinity in Fatima, Portugal are so integral to its artistic and iconographic importance that the shrine is seeking status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
But other churches are reconsidering. Bishop Jean-Marc Micas, whose diocese includes the Lourdes, France shrine, announced the creation of a study group last year to consider what to do with Rupnik’s mosaics. A decision is expected soon.
A reflection is also taking place at the Knights of Columbus’ St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington D.C. The Knights said the outcome of the Vatican’s canonical trial against Rupnik would be “an important factor in our considerations.”
Amidst a landscape where faith and identity often seem at odds, Amethyst Holmes, M. Div.’24, emerges as a trailblazer in a world where diversity, equity, and inclusion measures are being challenged and revoked.
As an LGBTQ+-identifying divinity scholar with a background in journalism, Holmes’ work centers around the intersections of faith, race, sports, and culture. She has dedicated her life to bridging these seemingly contrasting aspects of human experience. In this question-and-answer session, Holmes shares her journey, insights, and hopes for the future of religious scholarship and inclusion.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell us about your personal journey of reconciling your LGBTQ+ identity with your faith? What were some of the pivotal moments or challenges you faced along the way?
AH: From the time I was in elementary or middle school, I knew there was something different about me. I grew up in a Black Baptist church in the Deep South that, in my memory, wasn’t vehemently hateful toward LGBTQ+ folks, but wasn’t explicitly open and affirming either. There was mostly an understood silence. I was in my early twenties when I named my queerness out loud for myself. I rediscovered my identity while serving on a ministry staff, one that was unquestionably non-affirming. God is funny like that sometimes. There were some friendships I had to grieve and set boundaries for to ensure my emotional and spiritual safety, but God’s love and acceptance of me wasn’t something I questioned. I grew up going to church nearly every day of the week, so the way some faith leaders have used scripture to justify hate and demonize LGBTQ+ folks always felt so incongruent to the truth of who God is and who I know God to be. I wanted to commit myself to studying a text that animates so much of my life as well as how it has influenced our broader society and its implications.
What role do you see yourself playing as an advocate for LGBTQ inclusion within religious communities? Could you share some of the initiatives you have led or supported to promote inclusivity and affirmation?
AH: This latest backlash of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and trans antagonism across the country is tied to the rise of religious extremism. I want to support ministers who debunk harmful myths and narratives about our LGBTQ+ community members by encouraging them to discuss these life-altering bills with their congregations, converse with their queer neighbors, and organize with like-minded faith-based groups. There are many organizations like Pride in the Pews, The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, and Q Christian Fellowship and others outside of the Christian tradition that I see myself continuing to support.
How do other aspects of your identity, such as your race, gender, or cultural background, intersect with your LGBTQ+ identity and influence your work in divinity?
AH: All my intersecting identities show up in anything I do, and I continue to show up as authentically as I can. My Blackness, woman-ness, Southerness, and queerness all help me ask better questions of Biblical text. My identities widen the lens I see scripture through, leading to deeper theological understanding, greater humility, and more compassionate ministry. Pauli Murray (J.D. ’44, H. ’17) often comes to mind when I think about what it means to be an embodied person. Their work as a lawyer informed her ministry as an Episcopal priest and vice versa. Her legacy motivates me to be courageous, sincere, and defiant. Seeing their class picture on the wall on my way to Dunbarton Chapel is a small, present reminder to keep going.
What are some of the specific challenges you have encountered as an LGBTQ+ scholar in the academic world? How have you navigated these challenges, and what support systems have been crucial for you?
AH: Thankfully I’ve experienced openness from my colleagues and professors who enthusiastically encourage me in whatever work the Spirit leads me to do. Faculty at seminaries and Historically Black Theological Institutions specifically have an opportunity and responsibility to include more queer scholarship in their curriculums. Including queer theologians’ voices can enhance the student experience, expand theological imagination, and equip seminarians for 21st century ministry and beyond. I’ve leaned on my community of loved ones, classmates, and other queer clergy alumni throughout my time at Howard University’s School of Divinity (HUSD). They have helped me navigate ministry politics, affirmed me, and emboldened me in my ministry endeavors.
Your theological perspectives and interpretations are undoubtedly shaped by your experiences. How does your LGBTQ+ identity influence your understanding and teaching of religious texts and doctrines?
AH: I know it can be hard to resonate with a sacred text that preachers have often used to shout about abomination and damnation. My queer identity has helped me accept the invitation to see sacred text from the margins of society. As a Black woman, I understand the Bible from the margins, but my queerness has widened my perspective. Queerness, as Bell Hooks’ defines it, is a transgressive force that is at odds with what is considered normative or disrupts the status quo. Queer as in challenging societal norms and resisting oppression. My queerness helps me highlight the transgressive, upside-down nature of the Gospel and to, as theologian Patrick S. Cheng asserts, understand Christian theology as a “fundamentally queer enterprise” because it dismantles life and death binaries through radical love. Jesus’ story of incarnation, transformation and resurrection, and the invitation to be part of God’s chosen family hits different for me now!
Looking ahead, what are your visions and goals for the future of religious scholarship and LGBTQ+ inclusion? How do you hope to influence the next generation of scholars and religious leaders?
AH: I think the future is bright and will continue to get brighter because many folks inside and outside of academia are doing tremendous work to advance LGBTQ+ inclusion and liberation. I’m excited about the launch of QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion and the scholarship that’s being produced.I’m inspired by [numerous] queer womanist scholars and preachers like Jennifer S. Leath, Naomi Washington-Leapheart, and Whitney Baisden-Bond. I’m deeply moved by Cole Arthur Riley’s contemplative work and Ashon T. Crawley’s artistic vision. I’m motivated by the ministry Bishop Yvette A. Flunder, Brandon Thomas Crowley, and many queer people of faith across religious traditions.
Throughout my time at HUSD, I’ve explored my interests in ecotheology and environmental justice. I hope to practice eco-chaplaincy and provide spiritual care for communities most affected by climate change. God delights in, speaks to, and ministers through LGBTQ+ folks and has since the beginning of time. We, too, are called to create a more loving, just, and inclusive world.
— Most Catholics have little sense of the liberal archbishop behind the Vatican’s pronouncements. But critics of the pope see Víctor Manuel Fernández as Enemy No. 2.
Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández visits the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace after his appointment in September.
When Pope Francis first asked if he would be willing to take one of the loftiest jobs at the Vatican, heading the office that sets the policies of the Roman Catholic Church, Víctor Manuel Fernández said no. The liberal Argentine archbishop worried hisappointment might make things worse for a pope facing historic internal dissent.
“I knew that there were groups that did not love me, some willing to do anything — judging by the expressions they used on social networks and even in messages they wrote on my Facebook page — and I was afraid of causing problems for Francis,” Fernández said in an interview with The Washington Post.
When the pope called again last June, from a hospital where he’d just undergone intestinal surgery, Fernández relented. He moved to Vatican City, was named a cardinal and became the pope’s right-hand man, helping to translate the changes in tone and style Francis brought to the papacy into concrete new guidelines for 1.4 billion Catholics.
“Fernández’s appointment was the most consequential of [Francis’s] pontificate,” said Massimo Faggioli, a Catholic theologian at Villanova University. “After one year of Fernández, we’ve witnessed a series … of frequent, specific, out-of-the-ordinary actions the likes of which have never been observed. And this from a prefect who knows full well that he’s Francis’s own alter ego and enjoys the pope’s complete trust.”
Most Catholics have little sense of the man behind the Vatican’s recent major pronouncements, including blessings for people in same-sex relationships. But the church conservatives opposed to Francis see Fernández as Enemy No. 2. Within the walls of Vatican City, the machinations against the 61-year old cardinal have risen to the level of high palace intrigue, complete with photos snapped surreptitiously in the night and in the night and private threats to “destroy” him.
A new era for an old office
Fernández’s arrival marked the end of an era of conservative leadership in the Vatican department known as the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith. The office is most famous for the tribunals of the Roman Inquisition in the 16th century. In more recent decades, it has managed — critics say mismanaged — cases of clerical abuse; reinforced the “immorality” of premarital sex, abortion and euthanasia; and disciplined bishops, priests and nuns for not toeing the Vatican line.
Through Fernández,Pope Francis set out to reinvent the office.
“The dicastery that you will preside over in other epochs came to use immoral methods,” he wrote in a letter to Fernández in July. “Those were times when more than promoting theological knowledge they chased after possible doctrinal errors. What I expect from you is something without doubt much different.”
Like Francis, Fernández — known widely by his nickname “Tucho” — has ushered in a change in tone. In news conferences, his extended digressions and elaborate anecdotes can feel like falling “into a short story by Borges,” a writer for the Catholic Herald assessed. In one session, he uttered a mild profanity. “Tucho, the cardinal prefect with a sinful penchant for swear words,” a scandalized Italian news outlet declared.
Last month, he released a new ruling that took some of the magic out of the Catholic Church, removing a bishop’s right to declare unexplained phenomena — such as claimed apparitions of the Virgin Mary — as “supernatural” events. And last week his office took its most decisive action yet against the pope’s critics, launching a trial of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò on charges of fomenting schism and denying the pope’s legitimacy.
Senior church critics insist it is no coincidence that Francis waited to place Fernández in the rulemaking post until after the death of Benedict XVI, the traditionalist pope emeritus.
“I think Pope Francis felt himself now freer to realize his ideas,” said Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, an ally of Benedict who ran the dicastery from 2012 to 2017. “And therefore, he asked [Cardinal] Fernández to come [to] his side, and to promote this program, this agenda.”
Not all of Fernández’s work has come off as “liberal.” LGBTQ+ activists were taken aback in April when he unveiled a document, also signed by the pope, that said “sex-change intervention” threatened “human dignity.” Fernández told The Post that a version drafted before his arrival had focused more heavily on gender identity, and part of his contribution had been to bring its contents in line with the pope’s broadly inclusive message toward migrants, the poor and others. The final document, he noted, also explicitly denounced persecution based on sexual orientation.
The mission of inclusion led by Francis and Fernández took a hit as a result of the pope’s repeated use of a slur in closed-door discussions about upholding the ban on openly gay men studying for the priesthood.
“Certainly it has done damage to the relationship that was created with the LGBTQ+ community,” Faggioli said.
Fernández argued that in clerical circles, the word the pope used — “frociaggine,” or “faggotness” — is not “a synonym for homosexuality” but refers to “some groups in seminaries and in priestly environments that lobby in search of power” and “see all heterosexuals as potential enemies.”
“It is true that it would be advisable to find another word to express that reality, because it can seem homophobic,” Fernández said. “But I have seen gays themselves use similar expressions.”
He also left open the door to a recasting of official church teaching — or catechism — that states homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.”
“All subjects can be refined,” he said. “And the language we use can always be much better. In this way there is a chance of greater clarity.”
Pushback and threats
The changes brought about by Fernández and the pope have deepened rifts within the church. The ruling on same-sex blessings prompted a rebellion by Catholic bishops and cardinals in Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. There was grumbling inside the Vatican, too.
Fernández declined to comment on specific threats and intrigues. But in January, he told the Italian outlet La Stampa that “three times I received threats [saying], ‘we shall destroy you.’”
In one previously undisclosed incident, Fernández went to the pope over concerns he was being surveilled, according to a person familiar with the events who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential Vatican matters.
Those concerns were based on a photograph published in November by a conservative Spanish-language Catholic blog. In that nighttime photo, which accompanied an article critical of Fernández, he is seen talking on the phone at a distance through a window of his home on restricted Vatican grounds. The photo identifies the location of his private quarters, and Fernández took that as both an invasion of privacy and a veiled threat, the person said.
Opponents have additionally unearthed and circulated two esoteric tomes — “Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing” and “Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality” — that Fernández wrote in the 1990s, and in which he mused in detail on the spiritual aspects of sexual orgasms and recounted a sensual encounter with Jesus as imagined by a 16-year-old girl.
Decrying them as “scandalous books of an erotic nature which border on pornography,” one arch-conservative Catholic group — the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and Family — has demanded Fernández’s resignation.
In retrospect, Fernández said, the books reflected less maturity than he would have liked, but he maintained the topics should not be off-limits in spiritual discourse: “I don’t have any shame of the subjects,” he said. “If I had to write them today, they would be richer and more complete.”
A long history with Francis
The campaign against Fernández, and by default, against the pope, has also revived old claims that the Argentine cardinal long served as Francis’s secret “ghost writer” on important papal documents. In his office just south of the colonnades of St. Peter’s Square, Fernández declined to discuss the topic. But there is no question that he is a longtime friend of Francis.
In 2007, Francis — then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires — invited Fernández to a major Latin American Episcopal conference and ended up having him work on the gathering’s concluding document. They sat together on the flight home and engaged in deep conversation, Fernández said.
“We all know that the pope is a very austere man in his personal life,” said Alberto Bochatey, an auxiliary bishop in Fernández’s former diocese of La Plata, Argentina. “In Buenos Aires, he cooked for himself, washed his dishes and had a Tupperware with his vegetables. In that sense, [Fernández] is very similar, and there may have been a human as well as a theological affinity.”
In 2009, the future pope asked Fernández to be rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina. Fernández has publicly recounted how his detractors sought to undermine him by resurfacing magazine pieces he’d written. In one, he tried to explain the church’s stance against same-sex marriage while offering no moral condemnation.
After his local critics sent those pieces to the Vatican, the dicastery opened a file on him, Fernández has said. He felt as if he were wandering “among the wolves,” he recalled to reporters in April. But Francis had inspired him to stay and fight.
That seems his approach now, too.
The pope’s defender
Fernández has been criticized as a choice for his role by survivors of clerical abuse, who point to instances in Argentina where he allegedly sought to protect accused priests. Fernández has admitted to mistakes, and in a Facebook post last year, said his initial reluctance to accept the Vatican job was also based on the fact that he “felt unqualified” to manage the sensitive cases of clerical abuse within the dicastery. The pope was so bent on hiring Fernández, however, that he navigated that issue by ring-fencing the dicastery’s work on abuse cases under autonomous investigators.
More than anything, Fernández has emerged as the pope’s chief defender, repeatedly reminding the pontiff’s Catholic critics of their obligation to papal fealty.
“Religious assent of mind and will must be shown,” Fernández said during one news conference in which he read aloud from a page of canon law.
>No, he told senior church figures who were in revolt, the pope’s pronouncement on blessings for same-sex couples was not “heretical” or “blasphemous.”
He has expressed an understanding of cultural differences on gender and sexuality in various countries but pushed back against critics of Francis’s LGBTQ+ outreach.
“What they want [the church] to say is that homosexuals are going to hell, they have to convert, if they don’t, they can’t come to church less have a blessing. This is what they want,” Fernández said.
