One curious feature of the modern papacy is the informal, but very real, PR safety net which grows up almost spontaneously around every pontiff.
It’s forged in part by the Vatican’s own official communications channels, but even more so by outside commentators and media platforms heavily invested in selling a given pope’s story to the world.
Throughout his papacy, John Paul II enjoyed a wide network of friendly commentators and analysts, forever prepared to interpret the pope in the best possible light.
Benedict XVI had his own support system, though smaller and quieter by comparison.
The fact that Francis has such a coterie – not the same people, obviously, but doing much the same thing – has been made abundantly clear in the last 24 hours or so.
It is clear vis-à-vis news reports that he used a crude slang term in referring to homosexuals in a May 20 session with Italian bishops.
Ironically, it’s possible that in this case, the pope’s mediatic Praetorian Guard actually may be misrepresenting the pontiff in order to save him, but more on that in a moment.
Private meeting
To set the scene, on May 20 Pope Francis was in the Vatican’s synod hall in order to address the spring plenary assembly of the Italian Episcopal Conference (known by the acronym CEI).
There were roughly 230 bishops in the room, along with other clergy and supporting staff, meaning this wasn’t just a casual chat among a handful of friends.
Technically, Francis’s remarks to CEI are considered private, meaning the Vatican doesn’t release an official transcript.
Yet with that many people in the room – some of whom, by the way, have awfully cosy relationships with reporters – it’s generally foreordained that whatever the pope says will get out.
Certainly, the media-savvy Francis would have understood that whatever he said in that space was unlikely to stay there.
The gossips say
One of the topics that arose at the meting was the question of the admission of homosexual men to Catholic seminaries. Soon afterwards, rumors began to circulate.
It was said that Francis had used an off-colour term in the context of the discussion, saying there’s already too much frociaggine in seminaries, which translates roughly to “faggotry.”
The root term in Italian is frocio, the most widely used pejorative term in Italian for a gay man, the etymology of which has been lost in time.
(One theory traces it back to the 1527 sack of Rome, when feroci, or “ferocious”, invading troops supposedly raped men and women indistinctly, but nobody really knows.)
The suffix -aggine denotes a quality or characteristic; for instance, Italians take the word stupido (which means what you think) and turn it into stupidaggini to convey acts of stupidity, i.e., “nonsense.”
A matter of language
The rumour that Francis used the word was first made public by the Italian blog Dagospia, which is more or less the country’s equivalent of the Drudge Report,
It was then picked up by mainstream media, first in Italy and then around the world.
In presenting the news, a striking share of media outlets have done so in ways seemingly intended to take the pope off the hook.
They note high up in their coverage that Italian is not his mother tongue and suggest he may not have understood that the term in question is offensive.
One prominent Italian newspaper, for example, pointed out that growing up in Argentina, the future pope spoke the Piedmont dialect rather than today’s standard Italian.
It quoted unnamed bishops present at the time who said “it was obvious Francis was not aware of how much in our language the word is weighty and offensive.”
Many media outlets also suggested the pope must not have known what he was saying, given his reputation as the pope of “Who am I to judge?”
Francis has built a reputation for being LGBTQ+-friendly, so the coverage holds, meaning that he must have used the term almost accidentally, without intending to shock or offend.
What should be made of these interpretations? Read more
- John L. Allen Jr. is the editor of Crux, specialising in coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church.
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News category: Analysis and Comment.
