Vatican’s Stance on Gays Makes It a Protest Target

ROME —  Andrea Ambrogetti revealed his homosexuality in a parish confessional many years ago and still remembers the disembodied voice of clerical condemnation--one that has driven legions of gay Roman Catholics from the church.

Branding gay sex sinful, the priest offered him a choice: “Marry a woman, or don’t do anything.”

Ambrogetti, an Italian academic who is now 36, chose neither marriage nor celibacy and eventually stopped going to confession. But he still attends Mass, insisting that one can be a practicing homosexual and a practicing Catholic at the same time.

That belief is now a topic of unprecedented debate in Italy. The Vatican rejects it, as do many Italian gays and lesbians who have fallen away from a church they view as an unbending oppressor.

But an international gay pride festival here this week has energized a small group of Italian Catholics who, along with scattered supporters in the clergy, are making gay rights a religious cause as well as a secular one. They plan to march through Rome today with thousands of other gay rights activists from about 40 countries in the largest such demonstration ever held in the Vatican’s home city.

“Most gays think a dialogue with the church is a waste of time,” said Ambrogetti, a leading gay Catholic activist. “But we must confront the problem of intolerance at its roots, and those roots are the church’s dogma. It defines the prejudices of not just Catholics but also many Italians who have never been religious.”

To spotlight the Vatican’s views, organizers scheduled the global gay fest in Rome during the church’s millennial Holy Year celebrations. The provocative tactic worked: Vatican efforts to get the nine-day event postponed or moved provoked intense soul-searching in Italy and inside its dominant church.

“It pains me to see that young people are being told that the church is their enemy,” Italian Cardinal Ersilio Tonini said in an impassioned television interview. “But the church has to tell the truth, even if that truth is not fashionable.”

Vatican theologian Georges Cottier felt obliged this week to repeat the Catholic teaching that homosexuality is a “disorder.” The Vatican opposes efforts in Italy and elsewhere to legalize same-sex unions and allow gay couples to adopt children, he said, “because such ideas lead to the destruction of marriage and the family.”

Seeking to muffle differences within the church hierarchy, the Vatican forbade a French prelate, Msgr. Jacques Gaillot, from speaking here Monday at a gay pride seminar on religion and homosexuality.

But Gaillot turned up anyway, sat outside the conference room and chided the church for treating homosexual Catholics like outcasts.

“It should behave as parents who discover their son is gay and, after being upset at first, learn to accept it and love him for what he is,” the bishop told reporters.

A small, vocal minority of Italian priests echoes Gaillot, saying the church should at least listen to gay Catholics.

“If Jesus were in Rome, he would treat these people as brothers, follow their march and get them to explain who they are and what they want,” said Father Gino Rigoldi, a priest from Milan.

Most Italians don’t really want to know. In a society where few celebrities outside the fashion world are openly homosexual, 1,000 members of the Catholic mainstream turned out last weekend for a seven-mile walk to offer “penance” for the gay pride fest.

U.S. activists at the festival have counseled the Italians to work for a long-term shift in Italian public opinion that might sway the Vatican.

Ambrogetti’s inter-religious organization, the Coordinating Committee of Christian Homosexual Groups in Italy, meets twice a month to debate such questions as the role of gay couples in God’s plan. The sessions are held in a Protestant church because no Catholic parish will welcome them.

But Ambrogetti sees “small signs of change.”

“A new era is starting,” he said. “The generation that runs the Vatican will give way to Catholics brought up in a different world.”