After his first outing at the end of May, Pope Francis slipped up again by using a vulgar and insulting Italian term towards gays. advising homosexuals wanting to become priests to go see a “psychologist”, a few days after a scandal which forced him to apologize, Italian media reported.
Asked about vocations during a private meeting with 200 priests at the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome, the 87-year-old Argentine pope repeated the term “frociaggine.”
The second slip in less than a month
According to the Italian news agency Ansa, the pope said that “in the Vatican there is an atmosphere of frociaggine.” “Gays are good boys (…), they seek the Lord. But it is better to direct them towards a good spiritual father, towards a psychologist” rather than accepting them at the seminary, he added, according to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
This word, which belongs to the dialect of Rome, is difficult to translate. It is in fact a derivative of “frocio”, an insult meaning “faggot” in Roman, and which pejoratively designates an environment conditioned by “fags” or “tarlouzes”.
At the end of May, Pope Francis had to apologize for having used this word during a closed-door meeting with Italian bishops, with the Vatican assuring that he had “never intended to offend or ‘express with homophobic remarks’.