Pope Francis reportedly told a man who was dismissed from a seminary for being a practicing homosexual to “go forward with your vocation.”
According to the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, 22-year-old Lorenzo Michele Noè Caruso received a letter from Francis in response to an email that Caruso sent the pontiff about the pope’s reported use of the vulgar phrase “frociaggine” (“f–ggotry”) in reference to homosexuals in seminaries.
“Thank you so much for your email,” Pope Francis wrote in a handwritten letter that was scanned and attached to the email, as Il Messagero reported. “I was struck by an expression of yours: ‘Toxic and elective clericalism’: and it is true! Do you know that clericalism is a plague?”
“Jesus calls everyone, everyone,” the letter continued. “Some people think of the Church as a customs office, and that is bad. The Church must be open to everyone. Brother, go ahead with your vocation.”
In his alleged response, Francis affirmed the homosexual man in his attempt to receive Holy Orders in explicit violation of Catholic teaching while also failing to call him to repentance and chastity.
The Catholic Church infallibly teaches that all homosexual activity is gravely sinful.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2357) teaches that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law.” The Catechism is very clear that homosexual activity can never be approved and repeats that “(h)omosexual persons are called to chastity,” adding that the homosexual inclination is “objectively disordered.”
The Church also prohibits men with homosexual tendencies from being admitted to seminary or Holy Orders, as a 2005 instruction from the Congregation for Catholic Education approved by Pope Benedict XVI declares. The instruction adds that “disturbances of a sexual nature,” such as a sodomitic inclination, “are incompatible with the priesthood.” The Vatican reaffirmed this ban in 2016.
Caruso told Il Messaggero that Francis’ “beautiful reply… makes it clear who the real Pope is, he is not what they made him out to be.”
“This letter gives me hope, now the seminary remains a dream not shelved,” he added.
The young man said that he was dismissed from the seminary when his “sexuality” was discovered.
According to Caruso, the letter he received from Francis has “heartened” him and other so-called “gay Catholics.”
In his letter to Francis, Caruso expressed his confidence that the ongoing Synod would reverse Catholic doctrine, “be a turning point,” and ensure that “all expressions [are seen as] God’s plan for our Church.”
He asked for a revision of the Church’s prohibition on men with homosexual tendencies from the seminaries because “many young people feel lost in a Church that often seems to have become tied to a toxic and elective clericalism,” he said, “where only some deserve to be welcomed and where others are excluded as false Christians,” as if renunciation from grave sin is not necessary to be Christian.
According to Il Messagero, Innocenzo Pontolillo, president of the notorious Italian pro-LGBT group “La Tenda di Gionata,” praised Francis’s letter as “welcoming, inclusive,” and “really beautiful.”
This instance is not the first time that reports of Pope Francis affirming pro-LGBT groups or individuals in their sinful practices and ideologies have come out. The openly homosexual priest Father James Alison said that the pontiff affirmed his homosexuality in a private phone call in 2017. In 2023, the pope reportedly told LGBT activist groups, including New Ways Ministry, to “go forward” with their activities during a private meeting at the Vatican.
The pope also has an extensive record of promoting heretical, pro-LGBT clerics like Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego and LGBT activist priests like Father James Martin, SJ. Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, SJ, of Luxembourg, whom Francis appointed the relator general of his Synod on Synodality, has said that he believes Church teaching on the sinfulness of homosexual acts is “false.”
In December, Francis approved the heterodox document Fiducia Supplicans authored by Cardinal Victor Fernández, head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Because it endorses the “blessing” of homosexual “couples,” it drew condemnations from bishops around the world, including Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Cardinal Robert Sarah, and the majority of the African bishops.
