Pope Francis says he won't judge gay priests

Pope Francis smiles during a news conference aboard the papal flight from Brazil to Rome yesterday.

Francis reached out to gay people yesterday, saying he wouldn’t judge priests for their sexual orientation in a remarkably open and wide-ranging news conference as he returned from his first foreign trip.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis asked.

His predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, signed a document in 2005 that said men with deep-rooted homosexual tendencies should not be priests.

Pope Francis was much more conciliatory, saying gay clergymen should be forgiven and their sins forgotten.

Pope Francis’s remarks came yesterday during a plane journey back to the Vatican from his first foreign trip in Brazil.

He was funny and candid during his first news conference that lasted almost 90 minutes.

He didn’t dodge a single question, even thanking the journalist who raised allegations reported by an Italian magazine that one of his trusted monsignors was involved in a scandalous gay tryst.

Pope Francis said he investigated and found nothing to back up the allegations.

He was asked about Italian media reports suggesting that a group within the Church tried to blackmail fellow Church officials with evidence of their homosexual activities. Italian media reported this year that the allegations contributed to Benedict’s decision to resign.

Stressing that Catholic social teaching calls for homosexuals to be treated with dignity and not marginalised, Pope Francis said it was something else entirely to conspire to use private information for blackmail or exert pressure.

Speaking in Italian with lapses in his native Spanish, Pope Francis dropped a few nuggets of other news:

* He said he was thinking of travelling to the Holy Land next year.

* The planned Dec 8 canonisations of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII will likely be postponed — perhaps until the weekend after Easter.

Pope Francis spoke lovingly of his predecessor, saying that having him living in the Vatican “is like having a grandfather, a wise grandfather, living at home”.

He said he regularly asks Benedict for advice, but dismissed suggestions that the German pontiff was exerting any influence on his papacy.

In a speech delivered in Rio, Pope Francis described the Church in feminine terms, saying it would be “sterile” without women.

Asked what role he foresaw for women, he said the Church must develop a more profound role for women, though he said “the door is closed” to ordaining women to the priesthood.