ROME — Pope Francis has named pro-LGBT Father Roberto Pasolini preacher of the Papal Household, generating new consternation among the Catholic faithful.
Father Pasolini, a 53-year-old Capuchin friar from Milan, is replacing Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, a man who has held the position of preacher of the Papal Household for 44 years since his appointment by Pope John Paul II in 1980.
In that new role, Father Pasolini “will deliver Advent and Lenten sermons to the pope and members of the Roman Curia.”
Since the priest’s elevation, his critics have pointed to troubling statements captured on video, where Pasolini encourages his congregations to imagine figures from the Bible having same-sex relations, and even entertains the possibility that Jesus and his disciples might have engaged in the same behavior.
We cannot simply say there is no “form of approval” of homosexual relations in the Bible, he told a group gathered at the Capuchin Convent in the northern Italian city of Varese last February.
Speaking of the friendship between Jonathan and King David, the priest said that while there was no explicit mention of a homosexual relationship in the biblical text, “we can imagine it, we can think about it, we can like to think about it, but it is not written.”
“Surely there were stories of homosexual love at the time, this is evident, so nothing prevents us from being able to think about it, to be able to imagine it,” he stated.
He then went on to suggest that homosexuality provides a plausible reason for the concern expressed by a Roman centurion for his sick servant in the gospel, which impels him to implore Jesus to heal him.
“Jesus never spoke so well of a person as of this man,” Pasolini noted, when he declared: “I have never seen such faith in Israel.”
For a Roman centurion a sick servant means nothing, the priest insisted, so when a centurion goes to such lengths to heal this servant it sparks a question: “Why was he so dear to him? Was he working well? Maybe he worked more than the others? We might think so, or, as some say, maybe there was a relationship between the two of them.”
“It is not unseemly to think so, but think a little if it were so: Jesus gave the greatest praise to whom?” he asked rhetorically, which means we may have “to reconsider all the opinions we have.”
There are other possible episodes, he said, which could even “go so far as to hypothesize that there could have been homosexual relationships, for example, within the circle of the disciples, between Jesus and the disciples, Jesus and Lazarus, because there are expressions that ‘Jesus loved Lazarus,’ there are very strong expressions.”
In conclusion, the priest said that the most plausible reason that the Bible seemed to condemn homosexual practice was because the people of the time had no understanding of a homosexual orientation, and thus homosexual acts seemed to be against nature.
“It must be said that the Bible does not even hypothesize a world in which there is a tendency that is not heterosexual,” he stated. “In the culture of that time, the only tendency that existed in the eyes of the authors and the people they saw was the heterosexual one.”
“For this reason, homosexual acts were stigmatized with such force,” he said, because “they were acts that were immediately cataloged as something that did not exist.”
The pope’s appointment of Father Pasolini to his new role as the Vatican’s official preacher follows closely on his announcement in October that he was naming the well-known gay-rights advocate Father Timothy Radcliffe to become a cardinal.
Father Radcliffe, the former superior general of the Dominican order, has urged Catholics to “accompany” gay people, which means, he said, “watching ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ reading gay novels, living with our gay friends and listening with them as they listen to the Lord.”
He has also argued that gay sex can be “Eucharistic,” and expressive of Christ’s self-gift in Holy Communion.
We cannot begin with the question of whether gay sex is permitted or forbidden, he exclaimed. “We must ask what it means, and how far it is Eucharistic.”
“Certainly, it can be generous, vulnerable, tender, mutual and non-violent. So, in many ways, I would think that it can be expressive of Christ’s self-gift,” he said.
“We can also see how it can be expressive of mutual fidelity, a covenantal relationship in which two people bind themselves to each other for ever,” he added.