New interpretation of old rules at Italian seminaries

The change in Italian seminaries comes before Trump’s inauguration and the risks his government poses to the prosecution of sexual abuse cases.

While the Italian bishops soften the rules of admission to their seminaries, in Switzerland, the Catholic Church's website rails against a 2023 report on clergy sexual abuse regarding the number of victims.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

Over the weekend, the news of a sudden change in the rules regulating the life of Italian Roman Catholic seminaries told the story of new interpretations to old rules when dealing with the requisites to be a priest in that church.

The news about the change in Italy was first reported by the Italian bishops’ website on January 9th, (available only in Italian here).

Over the same day, SIR, the news agency of the Italian bishops, published four different stories dealing with several aspects of the reform of the seminaries there. None of the stories deals with the changes regarding the sexual orientation of the candidates to priesthood.

However, there is an interview with bishop Steffano Manetti, chair of the commission for the formation of clergy at the Italian bishops’ conference. That is the most relevant story at SIR’s coverage. The interview is available only in Italian here.

In bishop Manetti’s take, the key to understand the reform lies in the idea of formation for priesthood as related to Pope Francis’s synodal approach and as a permanent, life-long task for the priest; not as something that ends when the seminarian becomes a priest.

Manetti does not acknowledge the issue, but it is as if he was aware of the dangers of ordination as an end, giving the priest some idea that they are set for the rest of their lives. It is part of the criticism of clericalism that has been a staple of Pope Francis’s pontificate.

The next day Religion News Service published a piece in English, and later other websites provided additional information about the reform.

Overall, the reception has been positive despite the limited scope of the changes. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor of America, the Jesuit magazine in the United States published over his social media the following message summarizing his take:

Criteria

As Martin states, the new rules are only partially new since they only stress the need to not limit the admission to whether or not a candidate to priesthood or religious life fits the definition of “deep-seated homosexual tendencies”.

The idea of excluding candidates fitting that “definition” of sorts comes from a document issued by Benedict XVI’s during the first year of his pontificate but crafted by him as head of the then Congregation, now Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. That 2005 document was a key feature of the Catholic Church’s response to the clergy sexual abuse crisis.

The document is the Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders on August 31st, 2005. It is available at the Holy See website in English here. The second paragraph of the Instruction claims:

In light of this abundant teaching, the present Instruction does not intend to dwell on all questions in the area of affectivity and sexuality that require an attentive discernment during the entire period of formation. Rather, it contains norms concerning a specific question, made more urgent by the current situation, and that is: whether to admit to the seminary and to holy orders candidates who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies.

So, it clearly singles out, from the outset, candidates to religious life, going as far as to state on the fifteenth paragraph:

If a candidate practises homosexuality or presents deep-seated homosexual tendencies, his spiritual director as well as his confessor have the duty to dissuade him in conscience from proceeding towards ordination.

The Vatican issued that document when Ratzinger became Pope but crafted while John Paul II ruled his Church as if he were unaware of the many abuses perpetrated by the likes of Marcial Maciel in Mexico, Julio César Grassi in Argentina, Fernando Karadima in Chile, and many other predators in the late 1990s and early Aughts.

The Instruction was later supplemented with a 2008 text titled Guidelines for the use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood (available in English here).

Indictment

There, the indictment on gay candidates to the priesthood and/or religious life leaves little or nothing to the interpretation of the readers. Paragraph 10 clearly states what is, up until now the official position of the Catholic Church with the relative exception of Italy, after Friday’s announcement:

10. It is possible that the candidate–notwithstanding his own commitment and the support of the psychologist, or psychotherapy–could continue to show himself unable to face realistically his areas of grave immaturity–even given the gradual nature of all human growth. Such areas of immaturity would include strong affective dependencies; notable lack of freedom in relations; excessive rigidity of character; lack of loyalty; uncertain sexual identity; deep-seated homosexual tendencies; etc. If this should be the case, the path of formation will have to be interrupted.

The new document, the so-called Ratio Nationalis, is available only in Italian here at the conference of bishops’ website or here at Scribd.

The key change of sorts in the approach in the Ratio Nationalis, appears at page 37. There it says:

In the formative process, when reference is made to homosexual tendencies, it is also appropriate not to reduce discernment to this aspect alone [deep-seated homosexual tendencies], but, as with every candidate, to grasp its meaning in the global framework of the young man's personality, so that, by knowing himself and integrating the objectives proper to the human and priestly vocation, he reaches a general harmony. The objective of the formation of the candidate for the priesthood in the affective-sexual sphere is the ability to accept as a gift, to freely choose and to live responsibly chastity in celibacy.

So, the change deals only with how to interpret the existing rules regarding the admission of candidates to priesthood and religious life in Italy. It is not a full reform. It is valid only in Italy, and only as an experiment for the next three years as stated on the copy of the decree of the Dicastery for the Clergy on page 3 of the Ratio Nationalis.

It is unclear how the Italian bishops will go about assessing how effective is this change, since training a candidate for the priest is a process taking more than three years.

Change in tone

It is just a change in tone, a despite its limited scope will face, no question about that, the same kind of criticism and attacks that Pope Francis still confronts after his decision to allow the informal blessings of “irregular couples.”

What is relevant, however, is that this minor change on how the hierarchy of the Catholic Church sees gay persons who wish to become priests or nuns, or religious males, comes almost four years after the bishops of Italy published a detailed report about the “formation of priest in times of abuse.”

That is neither an interpretation nor a pun on my side. It is the actual title of a document offered as a “subsidy” by the bishops of Italy to those priests in charge of their seminaries.

The document is available only in Italian here at the conference of bishops’ website and here at Scribd.

I translate the passage highlighted in the image before this paragraph as follows:

Homosexuality, pedophilia, and sexual abuse of minors

Another necessary distinction is that between homosexuality, pedophilia, and sexual abuse of minors, as to the differences between those conditions. If homosexuality indicates attraction for the same sex, generally without distinction of age, pedophilia features a sexual attraction towards minors with or without distinction of sex, of a pathological nature. In fact, we speak of pedophilic disorder in a subject sexually attracted exclusively to male or female minors or to both. It should also be noted that sexual abuse of a minor can be carried out independently of the presence of a pathology and the sexual orientation of the abuser. A direct correlation or connection between pedophilia and sexual orientation therefore does not exist in itself, at a theoretical-scientific level.

The fact, however, that sexual abuse has recorded a high number of male victims in the years of the peak of the phenomenon, raises the question of the possible impact of homosexual orientation on the phenomenon of abuse, with various possible interpretations.

This, combined with the fact that training structures can attract emotionally and sexually immature people, requires explicit vigilance in the formative journey and in discernment: in recognizing in the individual the possible presence of orientation towards people of the same sex and its nature (or its origin and its meaning in the overall framework of the personality of the person called to religious life), in detecting the awareness that he has of it and the degree of freedom in managing it, and in discerning with great rigor the possibility of an integration with the priestly vocation, without taking it for granted. The risk must be avoided that the candidate does not access this opening and there is no discussion with any educator, with the consequent danger that the formative journey in these cases is totally left in the hands of the subject. The “unsaid” in the sexual area, especially if problematic or experienced in an ambiguous way, can, over time, become seriously harmful.

So, it seems that despite the objections one can raise towards the document offered as a subsidy back in 2021, there was already there the acknowledgement of how misguided was John Paul II’s and Benedict XVI’s response to the early stages of the sexual abuse crisis and how rather blamed the crisis on gay clergy and not on how the Roman Catholic Church deals with sexuality at large.

It is unclear if the changes announced on January 9th would go further, as to prompt a change on the documents issued by Benedict XVI back in 2005 and 2008, but there is, on the 2021 subsidy and deep in the subtext of the 2025 document a timid disposition to acknowledge that blaming gay clergy was not the solution to the sexual abuse crisis.

What about frociaggine?

Also, it is impossible to miss that while reading about this timid change in how the Catholic Church deals with gay clergy one must keep in mind how Pope Francis himself talked at least twice in 2024 about gay persons when he used the Italian slur frociaggine.

Los Angeles Press published two stories dealing with issue. The stories appear before and after this paragraph.

Also, it must be stressed that even if this document is willing to challenge some of the assumptions with which John Paul II and Benedict XVI addressed the clergy sexual abuse crisis, there is an international context far less favorable to even talk about sexual abuse as a negative conduct.

The best example of the kind of challenging times coming for the issue of sexual abuse comes from the future composition and potential performance of the second presidential administration of Donald Trump in the United States.

There is plenty of information about Trump’s crimes, acknowledged as such after a trial in New York City, but he is not the only one in his team facing sexual abuse accusations.

To the potential implications of Trump’s second presidency for sexual abuse and how public opinion deals with that crime it is necessary to add a trend to discredit the victims and their advocates.

New trend?

A prime example of this possible new trend came, in the last days of 2024, from Switzerland. Back in 2023, the University of Zürich published a report on the extent of the clergy sexual abuse crisis there. The numbers were not notable, as the probe talks of at least one thousand victims.

That number is far smaller than an estimation published by Los Angeles Press back in the same year for over 60 countries with large Roman Catholic populations. The estimate for all the European countries in that piece is available in the story linked above. For Switzerland that estimate came to a minimum of 3, 455 and a maximum of 8, 705 victims of clergy sexual abuse. See the table below.

Those numbers are the result of using the criteria set by the Sauvé Report. So, it is hard to believe that the researchers at the University of Zürich were dishonest when they came with the one-thousand victims number published in the report available in German, French, and Italian, although a summary of the report is available here in English.

Los Angeles Press published a story only in Spanish at the time, linked after this paragraph.

It that respect it is hard to understand why a former member of a local Swiss government as Phillipe Spörry, the former State chancellor of the Swiss canton of Valais, loosely equivalent to a state governor in the United States or Mexico or to a province premier in Canada is trying to bring back the debate on clergy sexual abuse, and abuse at large to where it was back at the end of the 20th century.

Although the first paragraphs of Spörry’s piece, available here, seem to celebrate the University of Zürich report, the tone changes when he talks about the use of abuse accusations as an instrument to attack the Church and some of its leaders in his country.

Kath.ch has a way to automatically translate their pieces if requested by the reader, so it is useful to go there and see the kind of objections Spörry puts to the report and to what he sees as some kind of destructive behavior from Roman Catholic clergy attacking each other with accusations of mishandling of abuse cases there.

It is impossible to go into the details of those accusations, but what emerges is a certain concern or worry with these attitudes. It is understandable that abuse does not become a tool of intra-Church politics.

Objective evidence?

It is enough to see what happened in Peru with the Sodalitium to see how destructive that use of abuse can be, but also, precisely because of what happened at Peru it is necessary to be very careful when requesting, as Spörry does by the end of his piece for “a sufficient minimum amount of objective evidence” when dealing with clergy sexual abuse cases, as if the victims were in control, as one of many possible examples, of the places where abuse happens.

It could be that in a country as Switzerland one can fully trust the judiciary and the police to do that kind of request, but that kind of requests prevented in Latin American countries the very discussion of cases of clergy sexual abuse in the media, as the Peruvian case highlights.

It is as if there is still the expectation that victims should be ready to be victims, so they should immediately after the abuse be able to gather enough evidence against their predators.

It could be that, in the country that is the bank of the world elite it is easy to expect victims to do that, but I cannot imagine any possible advance for the victims if the expectation is, as it was back in the 20th century, that they should be ready to provide objective evidence, when some of their cases go back 10, 20 or more years. All the other objections from Spörry, who is a lawyer, follow similar lines.

What is most troubling of Spörry’s take is how his piece other Roman Catholic websites used it as to criticize the coverage given to the cases of predator clergy and, more so, the implications of that coverage.

I became aware of Spörry’s piece over the Spanish-speaking social media of AICA, the Argentine bishops news agency. If kath.ch’s headline in German for Spörry’s piece was laconic: “Dealing with the problem of sexual abuse as a challenge for the Catholic Church” (Der Umgang mit der Problematik des sexuellen Missbrauchs als Herausforderung für die katholische Kirche), in the Spanish-speaking version at AICA’s website the issue is not that simple.

The Argentine editors of Spörry’s piece ran with the headline: "Probing sexual abuse cases in the Church and the severity of false accusations" (La investigación de casos de abuso sexual en la Iglesia y la gravedad de las acusaciones falsas, available here only in Spanish).

In that regard, the Argentine editors of Spörry’s piece seem to be unable to acknowledge that if the University of Zürich probe was willing to talk about a larger, much larger, number of victims of clergy sexual abuse in Switzerland, there was room for them to publish false claims.

They did not. They stuck to what was available to them with the methods they were able to use when doing their probe, but they were not lying. If I were willing to criticize the Swiss report, I would say that it underestimates the number of victims there. Not the other way around, as Spörry seems to imply.

What lead the Argentine editors at AICA to highlight what the Swiss editors at Kath.ch did not?