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The President of the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women (CLAR) has apologised to Pope Francis for the leaked notes of a private conversation with the Holy Father over the weekend.
In a statement released on the CLAR website, Sr Mercedes Homes Leticia Sanches said there was no record of the conversation and what developed was a synthesis based on the memories of participants.
“It’s clear that based on this one cannot attribute with certainty to the Holy Father singular expressions in the text, but just the general sense,” the statement said.
Francis’, June 6, spoke to the group in his native Spanish language, and the comments were first reported on a Chilean website, Reflection and Liberation and translated into English by Rorate Caeli.
Without a request for authorisation to publish, the Holy Father is reported to have said, “In the Curia, there are also holy people, really, there are holy people. But there also is a stream of corruption, there is that as well, it is true… The “gay lobby” is mentioned, and it is true, it is there… We need to see what we can do…“
Vatican spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi, SJ, has refused to be drawn on the claim, labelling reports as “conjectures, fictions and opinions”.
Respected Vatican journalist John Thavis, who has seen the notes, writes, “It is important to point out that the text appears to be more working notes than an actual transcript, with plenty of ellipses. That means that nuances and qualifiers may have been lost along the way.”
Thavis however also points out that the the text appears to echo the tone of Pope Francis off-the-cuff comments made elsewhere, and that if anything were patently false in the report the Vatican would not have passed up the opportunity to “knock it down”.
Vatican expert Michael Sean Winters, who writes for the National Catholic Reporter, told Italy’s La Stampa daily, Wednesday, that a group of gay clerics in the Vatican was trying to push its own agenda.
“The homosexual clerics are often amongst the most conservative and traditionalist, decidedly against topics such as gay unions or equal rights. The problem is sometimes they unite to favour their own interests, and this is not acceptable to the pope,” he said.
“Francis wants to reform the curia, to free it from all the lobbies and the currents which prevent it from working as it should,” he said.
Sources
- NY Daily News
- The West Australian
- Reflection and Liberation
- Rorate Caeli
- John Thavis
- Image: Reflection and Liberation
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News category: World.
