Christians and the Catholic Church should apologise to gay people and other people it has offended – including the poor and exploited women and children – for the way it has treated them, Pope Francis said over the weekend.
In a wide-ranging interview conducted on a plane as he returned from a trip to Armenia, the Pope, responding to a question as to whether he agreed with a German cardinal that the Catholic Church should apologise for the way it had marginalised gay people, said the church must ask for “forgiveness” for its behaviour, saying that gay people “must not be discriminated against” and must be respected.
He then widened his answer to include the poor, exploited women and children exploited for labour, adding: “The church must ask forgiveness for many things, not just these. Forgiveness, not just apologies.”
During his trip to Armenia last week, Pope Francis was sharply rebuked by Turkey after he described the mass killings of Armenians during World War I as ‘genocide’. Speaking to reporters on the plane on the weekend, the Pope said that when people spoke of the “Armenian extermination” in his home country of Argentina, they always used the word ‘genocide’.
“I didn’t know another…” he said, adding that he had always spoken of three genocides during the 20th century. “The first was the Armenian, then that of Hitler, and the last is that of Stalin”.
– DAVID ADAMS
