Pope Francis repeated an anti-gay slur during a meeting with priests in Rome on Tuesday, Italian media reported, the same offensive term he was accused of using two weeks ago. The Vatican, in summarizing the meeting, said only that the pontiff had warned about the admission of gay men into Roman Catholic seminaries.
The Vatican did not address reports by two of Italy’s most prominent news agencies, ANSA and Adnkronos, that it had again used the word “frociaggine,” an offensive Italian slang term referring to gay men. The reports cited anonymous sources who they said had been present at the meeting.
The New York Times could not independently verify the Pope’s use of the term. A Vatican spokesman declined to comment Tuesday evening.
The pope was accused of using the same term last month in a private meeting with Italian bishops, according to several people present at the meeting who spoke anonymously to Italian media.
Those reports sparked widespread reaction and prompted an apology from the Pope, issued through the director of the Holy See press office, who said: “The Pope never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he extends his apologies to those who were offended by the use of a term, denounced by others.”
According to Vatican News, the Holy See’s online news site, Tuesday’s meeting took place at the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome. There, he said in his summary, the pope “spoke about the danger of ideologies in the church” and reiterated that while the church should welcome people “with homosexual tendencies,” it should exercise “prudence” in admitting them to seminaries. .
The Vatican said the closed-door meeting also addressed “pastoral” and “current” issues such as substance abuse, low voter turnout in elections and wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere.
Francis is widely credited with taking steps to welcome the LGBTQ community into the Roman Catholic Church, conveying a largely inclusive message and deciding to allow priests to bless same-sex couples.
But earlier reports about the pope’s use of the homophobic slur upset and alienated some members of the LGBTQ community, inside and outside the church.
After the reports in May, a gay priest wrote in America magazine, a Jesuit publication, that he was “shocked and saddened” by the comments and that “we need more than an apology for Pope Francis’ homophobic slur.”
The Italian politician Alessandro Zan, gay and prominent defender of the LGBTQ community, then wrote on social media: “There is not too much ‘frociaggine’. “There are too many homophobes.”