— The pope used homophobic slang and cautioned prelates about admitting gay men into seminaries. But ordination has also long been a refuge for gay faithful.
Pope Francis speaking on Wednesday during the weekly general audience at the Vatican.
When reports spread that Pope Francis had used an offensive anti-gay slur while speaking to Italian bishops at a conference last month, many Catholics were both shocked and baffled. How could a pope known for his openness to and acceptance of L.G.B.T.Q. people use homophobic slang and caution prelates about admitting gay men into seminaries?
But the question, and the apparent inconsistency in Francis’ messaging, reflect the deep contradictions and tensions that underlie the Roman Catholic Church’s and Francis’ relationship to homosexuality.
The church holds that “homosexual tendencies” are “intrinsically disordered.” When it comes to ordination, the church’s guidelines state that people with “deep-seated” gay tendencies should not become priests.
Yet ordination has also long been a refuge of sorts for homosexual Catholic men, according to researchers and priests, who say that at least thousands of clergymen are gay, though only a few are public about their sexual orientation because of the stigma it still carries in the church.
While in the past all of these contradictions were muffled by an aura of taboo, Francis’ recent off-the-cuff comments have thrown them into the open.
Despite evolutions in society, and Francis’ embrace of a more progressive approach, church teachings still describe homosexuality as a deviance and have enshrined that view in regulations and restrictions that critics say perpetuate a widespread homophobic outlook and fuel tensions.
“Until they change the law, as long as homosexuality is viewed as a deviance and an illness, nothing will change under St. Peter’s cupola,” said Luciano Tirinnanzi, who wrote a book about L.G.B.T.Q. people and the church.
Yet the presence of gay clergy has been a constant throughout history. St. Peter Damian, an 11th-century monk, fought against “sins of sodomy” in the church. Dante Alighieri punished gay clerics by plunging them into hell in his “Divine Comedy,” and there are documented cases dating to the 16th century of prelates who were accused of performing homosexual acts and killed. (Records of priests, and even cardinals and popes, who were unchaste with women and even had children are also abundant.)
Academics and prelates who promote L.G.B.T.Q. rights said that for gay Catholic men, becoming a priest was long viewed as a way to neutralize and overcome the stigma once associated with their sexual orientation, and perhaps even suppress it through celibacy.
“A large quantity of young religious men with homosexual tendencies looked for the sublimation of celibacy,” said Alberto Melloni, an Italian church historian.
It is hard to know exactly how many priests are gay, as there are no trustworthy statistics, but in the United States, gay men probably make up at least 30 to 40 percent of the American Catholic clergy, according to dozens of estimates from researchers and gay priests gathered in a 2019 investigation by The New York Times. Some priests and activists say the number is closer to 75 percent.
Demonstrators supporting changes in the Roman Catholic Church in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2022.
Last month, Francis said that there was already too much gayness, though he used a pejorative to describe it, according to two bishops who attended the conference and confirmed the Italian media reports that triggered an apology from the Vatican. Asked about Francis’ usage of a slur, bishops blamed it on Francis’ relaxed and colorful conversation style.
“When there are official speeches, he studies, but when he speaks off the cuff, a word that is not entirely ideal can also slip out,” said Luigi Mansi, the bishop of the Italian city of Andria. Bishop Francesco Savino, a vice president for the Italian bishops’ conference, blamed it on the fact that Francis is not a native Italian speaker. “When he talks, he uses terms that are a mix of Spanish, Argentine, Italian,” he said.
Yet despite the surprising use of the slur, it is not the first time Francis has reflected the church’s opposition to having homosexual men enter the ministry.
While he has acknowledged that many homosexual priests are good and holy, Francis has repeatedly expressed concern that homosexual candidates for priesthood can end up having relationships and living double lives.
In another closed-door session in 2018, reported by the Italian news media, he said men with “deep-rooted” homosexual tendencies should not be allowed to enter into seminaries.
Two years earlier, the pope greenlighted a document on priestly vocations that stated just the same, reprising a 2005 document approved by Benedict XVI.
The clergy has interpreted these instructions in different ways. The church states that “homosexual men should not be admitted to the orders,” said Piero Delbosco, the bishop of Cuneo, Italy, adding that there could be some leeway to determine whether a candidate might overcome homosexual tendencies.
Others, like Monsignor Mansi, say that “the church doesn’t say that gay people can’t be ordained.” But, he added, the church believes ordination should be avoided because it is harder for gay men to “observe and live celibate for their entire lives.” Experts and prelates who promote L.G.B.T.Q. rights strongly deny this claim.
“There are three ways that that’s being interpreted,” said the Rev. James Martin, a high-profile supporter of making the church more welcoming to gay Catholics. It is either no to homosexual seminarians, no to people who cannot maintain celibacy or no to anyone for whom that is the most important thing in their life, he said.
Francis’ messaging just added to the confusion, some said.
“He needs to clarify his message a little better because it does get confusing,” said Mr. DeBernardo. “It doesn’t help the situation. It problematizes the situation.”
>The confusion, critics said, blurs the line between celibacy and homosexuality, shifting the focus from a legitimate preoccupation with priests who are not chaste to a blanket stigmatization of all gay clergy. This, they say, can cause some potentially celibate gay men to be barred from ordination, and many more to simply hide their sexuality.
The Italian bishops’ conference has adopted new rules that deal specifically with ordaining gay priests in Italy, said Monsignor Savino. The rules, which are awaiting approval from the Vatican, are not yet public.
Italian bishops gathered in May in Vatican City. After the meeting, reports spread that the pope had used an offensive anti-gay slur while speaking to bishops.
Pope Francis’ use of the slur was prompted by a question from an Italian bishop about the issue, bishops said.
The topic of homosexuality, Monsignor Savino said, is “very debated” at the moment, as bishops with a more “pragmatic” and “dynamic” approach would like to update the rules. But progressive pushes inside the church often face blowback and prejudice.
Francis must play a delicate balancing act between a message of openness and inclusivity while recognizing the more conservative sensibilities of the church that remain firmly anti-gay.
When Francis last year allowed priests to bless same-sex couples, some bishops in conservative corners of the church pushed back. To placate them, the Vatican issued a statement that said that “local culture” should be taken into account when it came to applying the declaration, but that it would remain church policy.
When interviewed on this topic, some bishops referred to homosexuality as a “pathological” condition, a “problem” or used expressions like “normal sexuality” to refer to heterosexuality as opposed to homosexuality.
Even the church’s guidelines referring to “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” are “offensive,” Mr. Lepore said, because they convey the message that homosexuality can be transitory, healed and overcome.
He added that Francis’ effective messages of openness would inevitably be undercut if church teachings and a large parts of the clergy continued to consider homosexuality a disorder and not a sexual orientation.
“The difficulties, the rifts that the church lives,” he said. “It all comes from there.”
— To be Christ we have to follow His Way, not have his male body
Supporters of the Women’s Ordination Conference demonstrate to advocate and pray for the ordination of women as deacons, priests, and bishops into an inclusive and accountable Roman Catholic Church, near the Vatican in Rome on Oct. 6, 2023.
By Virginia Saldanha
The publication of Pope Francis’ interview with CBS Television anchor Norah O’Donnell has sent shock waves through reform-minded women and men throughout the world.
When asked specifically about women deacons in the Church, Francis said, “If it is deacons with Holy Orders, No. But women have always had, I would say, the function of deaconesses without being deacons, right? Women are of great service as women, not as ministers… within the Holy Orders.”
The pope’s response is reminiscent of the caste mindset in India. Dalits or former untouchable people cannot enter temples because they are Dalits! Women doing ministry cannot be ordained ministers because they are women.
Women are shocked firstly, because the synodal process which Pope Francis himself initiated to gather voices from every person in the Church, has not yet concluded, and yet he gives a definitive answer to the question of ordination of women deacons in the Church.
“What is the point of synodality if the pope shuts down a major question in an interview talk show? How banal. Why waste our time with a process that gets settled in a sound bite?” asks noted Jesuit moral theologian, James Kennan.
The US-based Women’s Ordination Conference expressed “great disappointment at Pope Francis’ failure to recognize the depth of women’s vocations and the urgency of affirming their full equality in the Church. For centuries, women have served in the tradition of Phoebe [Rm 16:1]. Women of every generation have experienced and expressed their vocation from God to serve the Church in ordained ministry.”
“Women do all the work but are denied the recognition and authority that is their due”
Astrid Lobo-Gajiwala of Bombay archdiocese said, “What angers me is how the pope continues to trivialize the vocation of women to the priesthood. A vocation is a call from God. By denying women ordained ministry the pope is asserting that God can never issue such a call to women. And the reason? They do not have male body parts.”
“His remarks about women’s ministry are humiliating and typical of a patriarchal mindset. Women do all the work but are denied the recognition and authority that is their due. How can we reconcile his closed mind on this issue with his call to synodality? Women’s role in the Church has been one of the key issues across the world. Why bother with creating a commission to study the issue of women deacons when the outcome is already fixed?” she asked.
Raynah Braganza Passanha of Pune diocese asks, “Why we are waiting for the Church to throw crumbs our way? Expectations always bring disappointment.”
She suggests, “It is time to challenge ourselves to make real what we have been asking for since no one is listening. If we are serious about what we believe is our right, we need to make it happen. Maybe we need to think of moving out of this limited mindset and evolve a model that is inclusive, a Christ-like, Jesus-inspired community.”
Jesus proclaimed his Mission in Luke 4:18, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind and set free the oppressed.” His ministry involved working with the least, the lost and the oppressed.
Women have been anointed in Baptism and Confirmation with the Spirit of the Lord. Women, as Pope Francis admits render valuable service in the Church, yet the grace of the sacrament of Ordination is withheld from women because we are deemed second class to men. Is subservience our lot in the Church, because Pope Francis feels that women are not worthy of representing Christ?!
“Women with vocations to ministry deserve to be treated on the same basis as their brothers”
It is disheartening that in the 21st century, the Church has failed to recognize women’s equality with men. Something that Jesus had already given to women in his time. This equality was exercised in the early Church.
Women responded with dedication and love following Jesus through the streets of Palestine, ministering to him, mourning at his crucifixion, and the first to meet him at his Resurrection. Yet, the leadership in the Catholic Church in recent centuries has kept women from any leadership and decision-making, claiming that Jesus did not ordain women!
“Women with vocations to ministry deserve to be treated on the same basis as their brothers, and that includes sacramental ordination. If the Church is supposed to be a sacrament of God’s love to the world, the persistence of misogyny in its structures and practices is a scandal and undermines the Church’s witness to the Gospel,” points out Irish theologian Ursula Halligan.
Francis’ response begs the question, what really is ordained priesthood? Theologically men become ‘other Christs,’ but do they really? The sex abuse scandal and its handling have debunked that idea for many across the world, making the institution lose a lot of its credibility.
To be Christ we have to follow His Way, not have his male body!
Ultimately, ordination seems to be all about power. A power that is used over people. Women entering into that space would disrupt that power and even expose its misuse. Is this the real fear?
This was the pope who asked, “Who am I to judge?” in response to a question about gay priests in 2013. He announced last year that he would allow priests to bless same-sex couples, defying conservative critics in the Roman Catholic Church. And he apologized only weeks ago, in a statement from the Vatican, for using an offensive Italian term for gay men at a conference of bishops.
So reports that Pope Francis had repeated the slur during a meeting with priests in Rome this week set off a wave of confusion and hurt among some gay Catholics who have carefully parsed his comments over the years for signs of greater acceptance from the church.
In interviews and public statements, some supporters of more acceptance for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics by the church said his remarks, made in reference to the presence of gay men in seminaries and the clergy, showed the limits of his tolerance. And some said they believed the pope may not have intended to convey bigotry, but that his pejorative language was jarring and unacceptable.
“I was experiencing a sense of whiplash,” said Michael O’Loughlin, the executive director of an L.G.B.T.Q. Catholic ministry based in New York, who, like many gay Catholics, has struggled with his relationship to the church. “Because I’ve been so used to covering some of these positive developments, and then when something like this happens, it’s like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’”
The Rev. James Martin, a high-profile supporter of making the church more welcoming to gay Catholics, said he met with the pope after the latest remarks at Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican guesthouse where the pope lives. “With his permission to share this, the Holy Father said he has known many good, holy and celibate seminarians and priests with homosexual tendencies,” Father Martin wrote on social media.
The pope had signaled support for reaching out to estranged gay Catholics, in part by meeting with Father Martin in 2019 after the priest’s book, “Building a Bridge,” had elicited criticism from conservative clergy members. Their recent meeting, which Father Martin said lasted for an hour on Wednesday, had been previously scheduled and, by coincidence, took place on the 25th anniversary of Father Martin’s ordination to the priesthood.
In an interview, Father Martin suggested that the pope, who is 87, had not fully understood the offensiveness of the slur, which he reportedly used jokingly. “To me, it’s clear that he understands now how much that word offended people,” Father Martin said. “And let me say, there is not an ounce of homophobia in Pope Francis. None.”
The Rev. James Martin supports making the church more welcoming to gay Catholics.
But the Rev. Bryan Massingale, an openly gay priest and theology professor at Fordham University in New York, said he was “shocked and saddened” by the pope’s words. The pope, Father Massingale said, bears responsibility for their far-reaching impact, regardless of his intent.
“Many gay people grow up all of our lives hearing various slurs and insults, and to say that you didn’t mean it maliciously doesn’t diminish it,” Father Massingale said in an interview. “Whether the pope intended it or not, the use of a derogatory slur, especially a second time, sends a message.”
Pope Francis was reported to have first used the anti-gay slur during a meeting of 250 Italian bishops late last month, when asked whether openly gay men should be admitted into seminaries. The bishops recently adopted new admission standards, which are awaiting Vatican approval. According to Italian news outlets, the pope replied that seminaries were already too full of “frociaggine,” an Italian slang term that translates to “faggotness,” and carries connotations of campiness and frivolous behavior.
The Italian news outlet Corriere della Sera reported on Wednesday that he used the term once again on Tuesday, when recounting the words of a bishop to a group of Italian priests. “A bishop came to see me and told me: ‘Here in the Vatican there is too much frociaggine,’” the news outlet reported the pope as saying.
Some observers of the popeinterpreted his remarks as allusions to priests whose traditionalist approach to both liturgical style and church teaching had been criticized by the pope before — some of whom are themselves gay, yet who may be among the most openly critical of gay sexuality. Others said he could have been suggesting that a large number of gay seminarians might inadvertently alienate heterosexual applicants to the seminary.
Some who have pushed for more acceptance of L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics saw in the pope’s remarks a reference to a concern he had shared before: that some clergy members were taking vows of chastity for which they were unprepared and ended up leading “double lives.” Others said the comments indicated the pope’s unwillingness to acknowledge the contributions of gay priests to the church, even as he has sought to be more welcoming of gay congregants.
All Catholic priests take a vow of celibacy. But in 2005, as the scope of revelations about the church’s sexual abuse crisis emerged, the church issued a document formally excluding most gay men from the priesthood, barring candidates “who are actively homosexual, have deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called gay culture.” Research commissioned by the church has shown that priests who have sexual experiences with same-sex partners are no more likely to abuse minors than others, yet L.G.B.T.Q. advocates say gay priests continue to be scapegoated and stigmatized.
Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a group based in Maryland that supports gay Catholics, said that one interpretation of the pope’s reported remarks was that he was making “an erroneous assumption that gay men are the priests that are going to be more sexually active than heterosexual men.”
“I wish he would use more precise language to say exactly what he means, because his recent words are puzzling to many,” said Mr. DeBernardo, who said he viewed acceptance of L.G.B.T.Q. people in the church as a matter of justice that sprung from his Catholic identity.
Mark D. Jordan, a professor at Harvard Divinity School who studies gender and sexuality in the church, said the ongoing efforts to interpret the pope’s remarks might be the result of a strategy of “deliberate ambiguity” on the pope’s part as he tries to balance the church’s political factions.
“Sometimes it seems as if the Vatican is saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what your orientation is, as long as you agree to be celibate,’” Dr. Jordan said. “Other times they seem to be saying: ‘No, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a celibate gay or not. If you’re gay, you shouldn’t be studying the priesthood.’”
He added: “I always liken it to reading ‘Pravda’ in the old days, where you had to read between the lines because what you were reading was a series of coded messages involving internal struggles in rooms that you could never reach.”
For Father Massingale, at Fordham, the pope’s remarks raised what he described in a recent essay as “the deepest question” facing the Catholic Church: “Are gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans and queer people fully equal members of the body of Christ?”
He said the remarks offered a more nuanced portrait of Francis, the Church’s 266th pope.
“People want to see him as either A or B,” he said. “He’s either a champion for the gay community or he’s a representative of a homophobic church. And what I’m trying to understand is that both things can be true.’’
— In Friday vote, church leaders cite a “history of trauma” inflicted on Native Americans, including generations of children removed from their families to be forcibly assimilated.
Clarita Vargas, 64, one of the survivors of St. Mary’s Mission, an Indian boarding school, stands in the St. Mary’s church on the Colville Reservation on Feb. 20 in Omak, Wash.
U.S. Catholic bishops issued a formal apology Friday morning for the church’s role in inflicting a “history of trauma” on Native Americans, including at church-run Indian boarding schools where a Washington Post investigation published last month documented pervasive sexual abuse by priests.
The vote by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which establishes policies and norms for the church in the United States, represents the most direct expression of regret to date by church officials for past participation in a systematic effort by the U.S. government to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into White society. By a 181-2 vote, the bishops approved a document, called “Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise: A Pastoral Framework for Indigenous Ministry.” Three people abstained.
The document does not specifically mention sexual abuse, but says “we all must do our part to increase awareness and break the culture of silence that surrounds all types of afflictions and past mistreatment and neglect.”
“The family systems of many Indigenous people never fully recovered from these tragedies, which often led to broken homes harmed by addiction, domestic abuse, abandonment and neglect,” the document states. “The Church recognizes that it has played a part in traumas experienced by Native children.”
While the 56-page document covers many aspects of the church’s relationship with Native Americans, it specifically highlights its role in the Indian boarding schools that were created in the 19th century as part of a U.S. government policy to eradicate Native American cultures.
For more than 100 years, children were removed from their families, stripped of their names, and often beaten for speaking their languages. Of more than 500 schools, 84 were operated by the Catholic Church or its religious affiliates, according to the bishops’ document.
Tens of thousands of Native American children were forced or coerced from their homes and sent to the boarding schools — the majority of them run or funded by the U.S. government — from 1819 until 1969. By 1900, 1 out of 5 Native American school-age children attended a boarding school. At least 500 children are believed to have died at the schools, according to the first major investigation into the boarding schools by the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The Post investigation found that at least 122 priests, sisters and brothers were assigned to 22 Catholic-run boarding schools since the 1890s who were later accused of sexually abusing Native American children under their care. Most of the documented abuse happened in the 1950s and 1960s, and involved more than 1,000 children, mostly in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, including Alaska.
Vargas exits the St. Mary’s church. She was 8 when she was sent to live at St. Mary’s Mission, where she suffered years of sexual abuse.
The Friday apology follows decades of efforts by Native Americans who survived boarding schools and their descendants to seek accountability from the U.S. government, the Catholic Church, individual religious entities and the Catholic priests who they said abused them.
The Jesuits agreed to pay $166 million in 2011 to about 500 boarding school survivors in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. For four years, advocates for boarding school survivors have urged Congress to create a Truth and Healing Commission to investigate Indian boarding schools and the country’s assimilation policy. Legislation to create the commission, similar to one established more than 15 years ago in Canada, was reintroduced in the Senate last year and this year in the House, but has not reached the floor for a vote in either chamber.
In March, members of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition met at the White House with a top aide to President Biden to ask for a presidential apology for the widespread mistreatment and abuse that Native American children suffered at boarding schools. The White House has not responded to requests for comment about the potential for a presidential apology.
Pope Francis traveled to Canada in 2022 to apologize for the church’s role in what he said was that government’s “cultural destruction and forced assimilation,” but the pope has remained silent about abuses in the United States.
The bishops’ statement Friday, though, offered a blunt assessment of the legacy of abuse of Native Americans.
“In these schools, Indigenous children were forced to abandon their traditional languages, dress, and customs,” the statement says. “Boarding schools were seen as one expedient means to achieve this cultural assimilation because they separated Indigenous children from their families and Tribes and ‘Americanized’ them while they were still malleable.”
The Indian boarding school system “left a legacy of community and individual trauma that broke down family and support systems among Indigenous communities,” the document says.
“Sadly, many Indigenous Catholics have felt a sense of abandonment in their relationship with Church leaders due to a lack of understanding of their unique cultural needs,” the document states. “We apologize for the failure to nurture, strengthen, honor, recognize, and appreciate those entrusted to our pastoral care.”
The Friday statement seeks to distance the church from what it says were “European and Eurocentric world powers” that devised “their own justifications to enslave, mistreat, and remove Indigenous peoples from their lands.”
“Let us be very clear here: The Catholic Church does not espouse these ideologies.”
The document also makes a nod to the long-standing belief that the treatment of Native Americans by the Catholic Church led to intergenerational trauma that continues today.
“Historical traumas are a significant contributor to the breakdown of family life among many Indigenous peoples,” the document states.
The document calls for more accountability of the Catholic Church and says “all members of the Church should be open to cooperating with Tribal and other government investigations into any Catholic involvement in ethnic abuse.”
The document’s preface states that this is the first time the U.S. bishops group has officially mentioned its relationship with Indigenous communities since 1977, according to the draft. Back then, the group issued a seven-page document that, for example, encouraged Catholic schools to “promote programs and activities that will enable students at all levels to appreciate American Indian history, cultures and spirituality.”
The church has addressed abuse by priests in U.S. parishes, but it has said little about the molestation of children in Indian boarding schools. And although the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has grappled in recent years with the legacy of the church-run schools, it has not until now issued a formal apology.
In December, according to the Pillar, a news website that covers the Catholic Church, the conference was set to discuss the church’s role in Indian boarding schools, but in the end it fell short of addressing the issue. A document was written by the conference’s subcommittee on Native American affairs, the story said. But the group went into a private session and some bishops were worried that “passages intended to express regret and moral responsibility for that treatment of Native communities could have been interpreted to create potential legal liability for the bishops,” according to the Pillar.
When asked about this account last month, the conference’s spokeswoman, Chieko Noguchi, said “liability issues did not factor into the withdrawal of the document for a vote by the body of bishops.”
— Pope Francis’s homophobic slur helped distract the attention from other sex-related blunders affecting the Catholic Church all over Latin America.
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
As with Pope Francis’s homophobic slur, Argentine archbishop Mestre’s sudden resignation reveals the many contradictions affecting the Catholic Church.
On top of the Roman and Argentine sex-related blunders, new details about clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church emerged in Ecuador and Bolivia in the first week of June.
News of Pope Francis’s using a homophobic slur during a meeting with Italian bishops, back on May 20th, stressed the contradictions in Roman Catholic doctrine and practice about sexuality.
Oddly enough, it also played well to hide another blunder made by two of the closest allies of the Pontiff both in Rome and back in Argentina, while hiding from view other attempts of the Church’s hierarchy in Argentina at making themselves relevant in the public sphere.
A few hours before the Italian newspaper La Repubblica’s social media accounts turned the internet into a burning prairie of sorts, news about the sudden resignation of archbishop Gabriel Antonio Mestre, shocked those of us who follow what happens in the Latin American Catholic leadership with news about his resignation.
At first, it was hard to understand what could force the resignation of a recent appointee to the Archdiocese of La Plata, the third or fourth most relevant see of the Catholic Church in the Pope’s country of origin.
Hard, but not unheard, as Los Ángeles Press proved a year ago when we published a full data base with the names of 110 early or unexpected resignations of bishops, a proxy of sorts for the depth of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the countries where those resignations happen. Here you can download an updated version of the Data Base with the most recent resignations.
Although few noticed Mestre’s resignation outside of Argentina in the mess that Catholic Internet was on the last week of May, his case confirms, for the 111th time, how unwilling is the Church to provide information as to why its leaders resign their office. It also proves how unwilling are the global Catholic leaders to address the crisis of confidence undermining the foundations of Catholicism.
As it happened with the Pope’s slur, Mestre’s sudden resignation stresses how opacity makes harder to take the Church’s words at face value; it deepens the crisis of confidence in an institution already facing the deepest crisis of trust in its history.
It is not as if Mestre was only one more bishop forced out of office in his prime due to bad choices or poor decision making. He was close to both Pope Francis and to the current chair of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith who was his predecessor at the archdiocese of La Plata, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández.
Perverse dynamics
Although it is clear that he had not been named a sexual predator, when looking at the silence, and the remains of his much-hyped appointment, it was clear that behind his sudden disappearance from the Catholic firmament is the reenactment of the perverse dynamics fueling the clergy sexual abuse crisis at a global scale.
Front page and page 14 of La Nación, a leading Argentine newspaper’s edition of Sunday May 26th, 2024.
What is worse. The toxic combination of the news about Mestre’s exit and the Pope’s slur scandal emerging in Rome the very same day made impossible to pay attention to the Argentine bishops’ attempt at confronting the deep political and economic crisis at their country.
On Saturday May 25th, less than 36 hours before the news of both Mestre’s resignation and the scandal regarding Pope Francis’s slur emerged, the current archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge García Cuerva, used his chance as the leading figure of the Te Deum at the cathedral in his country’s capital to stress the many contradictions of the current Argentine government.
Javier Milei and the archbishop Jorge García Cuerva at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Buenos Aires, Argentina. May 2024.
Him and the rest of Argentine bishops had been preparing for their performance in the rituals around the so-called Fiesta de Mayo (May 25th), a precursor of their Independence from Spain. García Cuerva and his fellow bishops aimed at using the Te Deum and other associated public activities to make the Church’s position clear on the current crisis.
Ojea addressed one of Argentina’s hot topics, the destiny, uncertain for many reasons, of tons of foodstuffs that were supposed to be delivered by the government but, somehow, in a fashion that would only happen in Latin America, ended up “lost” in the shelves of governmental entities, unable or unwilling to deliver them.
Clarín, a leading Argentine newspaper, from May 28th, 2024.
The political situation in Argentina was so bad that on Monday May 27th, when Mestre resigned and news about the Pontifical slur emerged in Rome, the Nation’s Chief of Cabinet, Nicolás Posse, resigned his office after weeks of rumors about the bad relation he already had with Javier Milei.
On the afternoon of Tuesday June 4th. Cáritas Argentina, the equivalent of Catholic Charities USA, used the same cathedral where archbishop García Cuerva called for a restoration of political sanity to organize a massive meal (see, in Spanish here, here and here), as to send a clear, undeniable message about the depth of the crisis there and the non-partisan nature of the Church’s involvement.
Mothers of the Fatherland
The communal meal was the first of a series of activities linking the current crisis in Argentina with Cáritas Argentina yearly campaign seeking donations to fund the so-called “communal pots”, offering meals to families in need all over Argentina.
The bishops were even promoting the figures of the females running those “communal pots”, most of them lay persons, with families of their own, calling them in Argentine Catholic media and social media “Mothers of the Fatherland” (Madres de la Patria).
The activities around the so-called Mothers of the Fatherland will continue up until June 19th, with a mass at the municipality of La Matanza, as can the picture posted immediately after this paragraph shows.
The ad promoting a mass for the “Mothers of the Fatherland”, the women behing the communal pots in Argentina.
La Matanza is a stronghold of Peronismo. The former minister of Finance, Sergio Massa, the Peronista presidential candidate won 61.2 percent of the more than 781 thousand votes casted there in the ballotage of November 2023.
Even the top Catholic think-tank in the country, the Observatorio de la Deuda Social Argentina, a non-for-profit, originally launched by Jorge Mario Bergoglio during his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires and chancellor of the Universidad Católica Argentina back in the aughts, published new data about the extent of the current crisis in that country.
The report can be read in the box immediately below or can be downloaded here.
Had the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Argentina been able to keep itself together, without any of the two scandals, the one at La Plata or the one in Rome, they would have come out with an advantage in giving some sense of order, of direction, in their country.
The multiple fiasco that has been Catholic communications over the last couple of weeks made that impossible. Despite García Cuerva’s best efforts to deliver a powerful yet respectful critique of President Javier Milei’s policies, the mess created by Mestre’s sudden resignation and Francis’s own mistake blurred García Cuerva’s Te Deum message.
Damaging policies
Even if some of the old Argentine media used García Cuerva’s message on their editions of May 26th to highlight their own angst with the uncertain future of the national government there, the Church’s critique of the damaging policies pursued by the Milei administration, had no chance to trump the combined effects of the slur and Mestre’s sudden and unexplained exit.
Mestre was not a minor figure in the Argentine Roman Catholic hierarchy. The archdiocese of La Plata is, on its own a very powerful position, held up until 2018 by conservative Héctor Rubén Aguer, the main rival of Jorge Mario Bergoglio when both were auxiliary bishops at Buenos Aires, and a key supporter of sexual predator Carlos Miguel Buela, as the story available only in Spanish linked after this paragraph describes.
If I was asked to rank the top archdioceses in Argentina, La Plata would come fourth, only behind Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Rosario. The city of La Plata, whose downtown is more French inspired than the city of Buenos Aires. It is the capital of the province or state of Buenos Aires (not to be confused with the eponymous city, the national capital). Mestre got the job when Pope Francis made Víctor Manuel Fernández a Cardinal and head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
To think that Mestre’s choice to become Tucho Fernández’s heir could be an improvised decision would be preposterous.
Before taking over Fernández’s see, he was bishop in the suffragan diocese of Mar del Plata, a city and port on the Argentine Atlantic coast, 330 kilometers or 200 miles South of La Plata and 375 kilometers or 234 miles South of Buenos Aires, as can be seen in the map immediately after.
A map of the City and Province of Buenos Aires, with the cities of La Plata and Mar del Plata, in Argentina.
Pope Francis appointed him back in 2017 and remained for little more than six years, until Fernández got his own promotion, so there is no way to claim that there were not enough chances to vet Mestre’s appointments as bishop of Mar del Plata and later as archbishop of La Plata.
Hermetic silence
To make matters worse, Mestre’s own heir at Mar del Plata, from November 21st, through December 13th of 2023, bishop José María Baliña, a former auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires, also resigned in the middle of the most hermetic silence.
Despite the silence regarding Baliña, Argentine local media published reports where his successor was supposed to be Gustavo Manuel Larrazábal. Catholic Hierarchy, the website this series uses as the base for these reports on the Catholic Church at a global scale, actually has Larrazábal as bishop of Mar del Plata for little over a month, from December 13th, 2023 through January 17th, 2024, when he resigned that position and went back to act as auxiliary bishop of San Juan de Cuyo.
La Nación from May 28th, 2024. On the front page and page 13 provides some details about Mestre’s resignation.
He went back to the position he was appointed back on June 2022, despite news published in local newspapers at Mar del Plata that were confirming on January 9th, 2024 that Larrazábal was about to take over as local bishop (see here in Spanish and here also in Spanish), although it was clear by January 11th, that Larrazábal new appointment was not going to come through (see in Spanish here).
Larrazábal’s appointment fell apart because of accusations of sexual abuse. It is not possible to say the same of either Mestre’s or Baliña’s, but the Church itself, either in Rome or at the offices of the Argentine Conference of Catholic Bishops in Buenos Aires, is unwilling to provide information on any of the three bishops involved in this fiasco.
As far as it is possible to know, Mestre’s fate was cast after a group showed up during mass to protest for his handling of the case of a priest under his care who left Mar del Plata for the diocese of Jujuy.
The group asked archbishop to stop the transfer of priest Luis Damián Albóndiga to Jujuy, a province or state in the Argentina Northern, on the other side of the country, near the border with Chile, more than 1,700 kilometers or more than 1,050 miles Northwest from Mar del Plata.
It is not clear what are the reasons behind the mobilization to reject Albóndiga’s transfer to the other extreme of Argentina, what is clear is that something damaging had to be at stake for Rome to react as it did.
What Mestre’s sudden resignation and the effects it had on the chances of the Catholic hierarchy to deliver a consistent message in the middle of the political and economic crisis in Argentina is that there is no cure for the propensity to sexual-scandal related blunders, as this was one of many during the month of May in the Catholic Church at a global scale.
May opened at a global scale with the faux pas of the Mexican Catholic hierarchy that first talked about the disappearance of Salvador Rangel, the emeritus bishop of Chilpancingo, Mexico, the story linked immediately after this paragraph that reveals how frail is the position of the Catholic Church in Mexico.
More geographic “solutions”
If that was not enough, in Ecuador, the local hierarchy there and their peers at Colombia got themselves into a mess of their own making when news erupted about how priests with credible accusations of sexual abuse move from one country into the other.
Previously on this series Los Ángeles Press has dealt with the use of the so-called geographic solution to clergy sexual abuse; that is to say, to move around predator priests from one country to other.
Unlike what happened with priest from Paraguay who was about to resume his career in Oaxaca, Mexico, neither the Ecuadoran nor the Colombian bishops seem to be interested in preventing the Ecuadoran priest from going to Colombia to “reinvent” himself as a priest there.
And, as the Spanish website Religión Digital stresses, archbishop Alfredo José Espinoza Mateus, originally a priest of the Salesian order, offered his priests as advice that if they were going to do “something stupid” they should do it in such a fashion that they would not bring about scandal.
The archbishop words are somehow troubling in Latin America where “pendejadas”, here translated neutrally as something stupid or something done by a child, could turn into an even worse scandal in Mexico and Central America where “pendejadas” has a ruder meaning, similar to “dumb shit” or something along those lines.
To make matters worse, in the early days of June, out of Bolivia further details emerged of the scale of clergy sexual abuse happening at the flagship institution of the Jesuits there in the last decades of the 20th century at the Colegio (school) Juan XXIII. Now the number of victims could be of at least four hundred males who were then minors.
Adding insult to injury, there is no indication as to whether the Spanish or the Bolivian provinces of Pope Francis’s religious order of origin, the Jesuits, will be willing to face the consequences of the behavior of members of that congregation, as can be read in this story from Bolivian media or, if you are willing to pay for a subscription, on this one from El Periódico de Aragón, a newspaper from Spain, whose most recent story on the issue appears as an image next.
Pages 28 and 29 from El Periódico de Aragón, Spain, June 7th, 2024.
What all these stories have in common is the perverse confluence of a religion that pretends to be rigid about sexuality, living a civil war of sorts because of the conflicting views about sexuality hold by their leaders, but that is unable to figure out a consistent, livable, solution to its own theology of sexuality.
The very archdiocese of La Plata offers various perfect examples of the contradictions marring the fruits of Catholic theology of sexuality. Back in 2023, in a story only published in Spanish, we offered an account of how a predator cleric in that district of the Argentine Roman Catholic Church ended up committing suicide after a judge issued an arrest warrant.
Although the abuse happened before Víctor Manuel Fernández’s time there, during Aguer’s tenure as archbishop Fernández was already there when parents of Catholic schools in the archdiocese asked him to avoid giving him a new assignment. What is worse, Fernández, publicly expressed support for the predator priest and even after his suicide, he had few words to offer to his victims.
And yes, Fernández’s writings on sexuality are not as affected by contradictions as the behavior of many predator priests, and there are no claims about Fernández abusing people under his care, but the very reactions Fernández faces because of his old writings about sexuality prove how marginal he is within the context of contemporary Roman Catholicism and its theological understanding of sexuality.
Two of those books are available here at Los Ángeles Press, in Spanish in the entries linked immediately before and immediately after this paragraph. Moreover, it is hard to say if current Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández would be willing to issue the Nihil Obstat for the publication of what priest Víctor Manuel Fernández wrote back in the 1990s.
The Catholic hierarchy, Argentine and global, would do itself a favor were they willing to accept how damaging the sudden resignation of archbishop Mestre and bishops Baliña and Larrazábal were, even in the absence of the pontifical slur.
Finally, it must be noted that to replace, at least for the time being archbishop Mestre, Pope Francis appointed auxiliary bishop of La Plata Alberto G. Bochatey.
Originally an Augustianian Friar, Bochatey has been an auxiliary since the days of Archbishop Aguer as head of the Archdiocese. As such, he was involved in Aguer’s faulty probes of sexual abuses cases in that diocese, including the one that ended in the 2019 suicide of predator priest Eduardo Lorenzo.
On his own, back in 2017, he was appointed by Pope Francis in charge of the probe regarding one of worst scandals in the history of clergy sexual abuse in Argentina and Latin America at large: the so-called Próvolo case.
As such, that case would require a full entry and perhaps a full book. Suffice to say at this point that it was a school for deaf boys and girls, and at least two priests, two nuns, and several employees of the Instituto Próvolo were originally charged with various forms of sexual abuse.
Sadly, the Argentine system of justifce found a way to exonerate some of those accused of sexually abusing students attending that school, originally located in the city of Luján de Cuyo, province of Mendoza.
In that regard, even if temporary, Bochatey’s appointment as head of the archdiocese of La Plata exacerbates the negative perception of how the Catholic Church deals globally with the effects of the sexual abuse crisis.
Bishop Bochatey, now in charge of La Plata, Bishop Ojea and the ambassador of Israel in Argentina,
Finally, there is a link to last week’s story, where I trace the origins and effects of the Pope’s homophobic slur during a private meeting with the Italian Roman Catholic Bishops.
