Jordi Bertomeu Farnós, a priest in the all-powerful Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and one of the Pope’s right-hand men in the fight against clerical sex abuse, took down the myth gay clerics are more likely to offend against minors in a essay for the Spanish magazine Palabra.

Bertomeu – one of the special investigators sent by the Pope to look into the sex abuse crisis in Chile in 2018 – based his conclusion on the 6,000 cases of priestly abuse against children that have made their way since 2001 to the CDF, the Vatican area in which serious canonical crimes committed by clerics are judged and sanctioned.

Criticising the “biased positions strongly influenced by a certain ultraconservative ideological posture” that would affirm otherwise, the CDF official underlined that “there is no direct relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia”.

Neither, Bertomeu continued, is there any relationship between pedophilia “and a ‘progressive style’ of clergy”.

“From a privileged observatory such as that of this Dicastery, it can be affirmed that the phenomenon of homosexuality does not know of clerical styles, since it affects [sic] priests of both a ‘traditional’ cut and others of a more open or ‘progressive’ cut (despite the misguided nature of these qualifiers)”, Bertomeu wrote.

The most that can be argued from CDF statistics is “that a certain homosexual subculture typical of some clerical groups and present in certain seminars or novitiates, with the consequent tolerance towards active homosexual behaviors, can lead to pedophilia”, the Vatican official continued. Read more via Novena News