Pope calls for a ‘ brotherhood’ with gay people

‘

If a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to

’ judge him? Pope Francis

yesterday ‘We cannot limit the

role of women’

THE Pope yesterday signalled a more tolerant era of Vatican thinking after he spoke in support of gay people.

Discussing homosexuality, he said: ‘We must be brothers.’

In the most conciliatory words yet from the Vatican on the subject of gay priests, he added: ‘If a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to judge him?’

The new Pope used a talk with journalists covering his visit to Brazil to emphasise Catholic teaching that says those who are gay should be accepted.

He stressed that the official position of the Church is that homosexual acts are sinful, but homosexual urges and thoughts are not.

In recent years, the pronouncements of Pope Francis’s predecessor Pope Benedict fiercely condemned gay rights and at one point, he described gay relationships as ‘evil’.

Speaking on his flight back to Rome from Rio, Pope Francis said: ‘The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this very well,’ he said.

‘It says they should not be marginalised because of this orientation but must be integrated into society.

‘The problem is not having this orientation. We must be brothers.

‘The problem is lobbying by this orientation, or lobbies of greedy people, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies, so many lobbies. This is the worse problem.’ But he deflected questions about a gay lobby active in the Vatican, said last month to have been the subject of complaints by the Pope.

‘You see a lot written about the gay lobby. I still have not seen anyone in the Vatican with an identity card saying they are gay,’ he added.

Nothing said during the 80-minute in-flight interview alters the strong Vatican opposition to gay relationships or marriage, or the Church ban on actively gay priests. But his words mark an entirely different emphasis since the retirement of Benedict in the spring.

Before he became Pope Benedict, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, said gay relationships were ‘evil’ and ‘contrary to natural order’.

In further evidence of a softening of attitudes, Pope Francis said women should be able to take more important roles in the Church – but not as priests.

‘We cannot limit the role of women in the Church to altar girls or the president of a charity, there must be more,’ he said in his first public statement on campaigns in the Catholic church for women priests.