ROME — A gay Filipino student publicly chided Pope Francis Thursday, telling the 87-year-old pontiff to stop using offensive slurs against homosexuals.
“Stop using offensive language against the LGBTQIA+ community; this leads to immense pain,” Jack Lorenz Acebedo Rivera said during a panel discussion with university students on “Building Bridges Across Asia Pacific.”
“I myself, I am outcasted and bullied due to my bisexuality, my gayness, my identity, and being a son of a single parent,” said Acebedo Rivera, who was wearing the rainbow sash of Gay Pride during the broadcast.
As Breitbart News has reported, Pope Francis has reportedly spoken out against excessive “faggotry” (frociaggine) in the Vatican on two separate occasions, sparking backlash from pro-gay factions.
In a closed-door meeting with Italian bishops on May 20, Francis reiterated the Church’s ban on accepting homosexuals to train for the priesthood, adding that there is already too much “faggotry” in some seminaries.
The bishops should “get all the fairies [checche] out of seminary, even those who are only semi-oriented,” the pope added, evincing a surprising command of vulgar Italian slang.
Following outrage over the pope’s comments, the Holy See Press Office hastened to issue an apology on the pope’s behalf, insisting that he “never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms.”
But several weeks later, Francis again decried an atmosphere of “faggotry” in the Vatican, repeating the exact same language that had gotten him into trouble just days before.
In a meeting with priests at Rome’s Salesian University, the pontiff lamented an “air of faggotry in the Vatican” in response to the question of whether he was worried about “the gay culture” inside Vatican walls.
Men with homosexual inclinations should be welcomed in the Church but should not be admitted into seminaries to train for the priesthood, the pope reportedly said.
In response to the pope’s remarks, pro-LGBTQ+ Jesuit Father James Martin said on X (formerly Twitter) that he has known “hundreds” of gay priests in his life as a Jesuit and that the Church would be “immeasurably poorer” without them.
“In my 25 years as a priest and almost 40 as a Jesuit, I’ve known hundreds of holy, faithful and celibate gay priests,” Father Martin wrote on X. “They’ve been my superiors, my teachers, my confessors, my mentors, my spiritual directors and my friends.”
The Jesuit order is known for the high percentage of homosexuals in its ranks, and according to the estimates of one of Father Martin’s Jesuit brothers, some 50 percent of the members of the Jesuit order are homosexual.
“Roughly half of the Society under the age of fifty shuffles on the borderline between declared and undeclared gayness,” wrote Jesuit Father Paul Shaughnessy in a 2002 essay in the Weekly Standard, titled, “Are the Jesuits Catholic?”
In his piece, Father Shaughnessy added that “the majority of Jesuit formatores, Jesuits in charge of training, are homosexual as well.”
