The AP has more details on Pope Francis’ comments confirming the existence of a Vatican “gay lobby.”
The AP story I linked to gives a pretty good summary of just what these ‘gay lobby’ comments are about.
In the days leading up to Pope Benedict XVI’s Feb. 28 resignation, Italian media were rife with reports of a “gay lobby” influencing papal decision-making and Vatican policy through blackmail, and suggestions that the scandal had led in part to Benedict’s decision to resign.
The unsourced reports, in the Rome daily La Repubblica and the news magazine Panorama, said details of the scandal were laid out in the secret dossier prepared for Benedict by three trusted cardinals who investigated the leaks of papal documents last year. Benedict left the dossier for Francis.
At the time, the Vatican denounced the reporting as defamatory, “unverified, unverifiable or completely false.”
The initial reporting has never been precise on what exactly was meant by a “gay lobby,” but Repubblica and Panorama went beyond saying there was merely a homosexual subculture at the Vatican. Rather, they raised allegations that high-ranking prelates were being blackmailed because they were gay.
