Christians must ask forgiveness for ways they have discriminated against gay people or fostered hostility towards them, Pope Francis has said.
“I think the Church not only must say it is sorry to the gay person it has offended, but also to the poor, to exploited women” and anyone whom the Church did not defend when it could, he told reporters at a press conference on the way back from Armenia.
Pope Francis was asked to comment on remarks reportedly made by Cardinal Reinhard Marx, president of the German bishops’ conference, that the Church must apologise to gay people for contributing to their marginalisation.
At the mention of the massacre last month at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the Pope closed his eyes and shook his head in dismay. “The Church must say it is sorry for not having behaved as it should many times, many times – when I say ‘the Church’, I mean we Christians because the Church is holy; we are the sinners,” the Pope said. “We Christians must say we are sorry.”
Changing what he had said in the past to the plural “we,” Pope Francis said that when a gay person “has good will and is seeking God, who are we to judge him?”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is clear, he said. “They must not be discriminated against. They must be respected, pastorally accompanied.”
Pope Francis said that in the “closed Catholic culture” of Buenos Aires in his childhood, Catholics would not let a divorced person into their house. “The culture has changed, and thanks be to God!
“We Christians have much to apologise for and not just in this area,” he said, referring to its treatment of gay people.
Christians ‘should be known by their love and kindness’
Acts of love and kindness must be a Christian’s “calling card”, the characteristic that identifies them more than anything, Pope Francis has told Catholics in northern Armenia.Celebrating the only public Mass scheduled for his three-day visit to predominantly Orthodox Armenia, Pope Francis told thousands of people in Vartanants Square in the city of Gyumri: “Concrete love is the Christian’s calling card; any other way of presenting ourselves could be misleading and even unhelpful.”
He explained that this is because Christians are called to be known by their love. At an evening prayer service in Yerevan, the capital, the Pope told people gathered in Republic Square that he and Catholicos Karekin II, the patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church, “look confidently towards the day when by God’s help we shall be united around the altar of Christ’s sacrifice in the fullness of Eucharistic communion. Let us pursue our journey with determination. Indeed, let us race towards our full communion!”
While in Armenia, Pope Francis stayed at the house of Karekin II.
‘Memories must be preserved’
Pope Francis has paid tribute to the estimated 1.5 million Armenians killed by Ottoman Turks in 1915-18.Visiting the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial, a monument to the martyrs, on Saturday, Pope Francis wrote in the guestbook: “May God preserve the memory of the Armenian people. Memories should not be watered down or forgotten; memory is a source of peace and of the future.”
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