German Catholics accuse papal ambassador of anti-LGBT+ remarks

Queer Catholics have criticized the Vatican’s ambassador to Germany for remarks he made during a pilgrimage to the western city of Aachen.

“The Catholic LGBT+ Committee is appalled that the Catholic Church is once again getting dangerously close to right-wing populist forces that construct gender diversity as an attack on the family instead of recognizing different ways of life and relationships,” Markus Gutfleisch, co-spokesman of the Catholic LGBT+ Committee, said on Tuesday.

LGBT+ is an abbreviation for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and wider queer community.

Apostolic Nuncio Nikola Eterović, the diplomatic representative of the Holy See in Berlin, quoted Pope Francis in a sermon at the Aachen pilgrimage last Sunday as saying that human beings have a nature “that they cannot manipulate at will.”

He went on to quote the pope as saying, “Precisely for this reason, the attitude of one who claims to erase the difference between the sexes is not healthy.”

Eterović himself stressed that “the Catholic Church has always proclaimed this doctrine in fidelity to the Lord and has withstood old and new attacks on the family, which is the original cell of Church and society.”

Gutfleisch said that Pope Francis had also made very different, appreciative statements. Eterović, however, deliberately singled out heterosexual marriage as the only permissible form of relationship, he said.

Moreover, he said, the nuncio had made no recognizable reference to the pilgrimage.