Pope Francis tells man who was sexually assaulted by Catholic priest that 'God loves gay people and it is fine to be homosexual' in closed-door meeting with Juan Carlos Cruz in the Vatican
"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet." Romans 1:26,27 (KJV)
EDITOR'S NOTE: Hoo boy, where oh where do I even start with this story? In the 1980's in Chile, Juan Carlos Cruz was repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted by his Catholic priest the Rev. Fernando Karadima. Cruz was by far not the only victim of the pedophile priests at the parish of El Bosque in Santiago, and the assaults were covered up by Bishop Juan Barros, who witnessed it all. Flash-forward to 2015 when Cruz writes a letter to the pope, begging for help, and the pope does nothing. In fact, when asked about it on his trip to Chile back in February, Pope Francis denied ever receiving such a letter, and when an uproar resulted from the Chilean victims, Francis was forced to confess that 'grave errors' were made by the Vatican. Hmm...but it amazingly doesn't end there. Flash-forward to May 2018, and the Catholic priest rape victim who became homosexual after being raped, had a private meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican where Francis told him that 'being gay is OK', and that 'God made you that way'. These are the words of a man who claims to be the 'vicar of Christ', who believes he sits in the place of God on this Earth, according to the official Catholic catechism.
The Pope made the remarks, which went significantly beyond his previous tolerance for homosexuality, during a meeting three weeks ago with a Chilean man who had been sexually abused by Catholic priests.
Pope Francis offered a heartfelt apology to Juan Carlos Cruz, who was a victim of Chile’s most notorious abusive priest, Fernando Karadima. Mr Cruz, who is gay, said the conversation moved on from the abuse crisis to the nature of homosexuality.
“He told me ‘Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter. God made you like that and he loves you like that and I do not care.
“The Pope loves you as you are, you have to be happy with who you are,’" Mr Cruz told El Pais, the Spanish newspaper. The Pope’s words appeared to go further in terms of tolerance than remarks he made in 2013, when he said of homosexuals “Who am I to judge?”
Speaking to the Vatican press corps on his return to Rome from a trip to Brazil, he said gay people should not be marginalised but rather integrated into society. He was responding to questions about claims of an alleged "gay lobby" of clerics working in the heart of the Vatican.
The Roman Catholic Church insists that while homosexual orientation is not sinful in itself, homosexual acts certainly are because they are “against natural law”. The Pope is not changing official Church teaching, but he is at least signalling a much more open and inclusive approach, which will upset many conservative Catholics.
The Vatican neither confirmed nor denied the comments that Francis reportedly made to Mr Cruz.
“This is not a shift in theological teaching or dogma,” said Robert Mickens, a Vatican expert and the editor of La Croix International, a Catholic publication.
“It was a pastoral response to an individual. The Pope always likes to deal with the individual.” The Pope elaborated on his ‘who am I to judge?’ comment in a recent book by an Italian expert on the Vatican.
Pope Francis accused the victims of the Chilean Catholic priests of 'slander' and refused to hear their complaints
The pontiff told him: "I was paraphrasing by heart the catechism of the Catholic Church where it says that these people should be treated with delicacy and not be marginalised."
He added: “Let us not forget that God loves all his creatures and we are destined to receive his infinite love."
Mr Cruz was one of three former sex abuse victims from Chile who came to Rome to receive an apology from Pope Francis for the years of abuse that they endured. The victims described clerical sexual abuse as “an epidemic that has destroyed thousands of lives.”
Pope Francis had initially been slow to realise the gravity of the crisis in Chile and even came to the defence of a controversial bishop linked to Father Karadima, the abusive priest.
But he performed an about-turn after Vatican investigators presented him with a 2,300-page dossier showing that sexual abuse of minors had been covered up in Chile for decades, in a pattern that has been repeated in many other countries, notably Ireland.
On Friday, Chile’s 34 bishops offered to resign en masse over the abuse scandal, an act without precedent in the history of the Catholic Church.
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