Does The Vatican Have A Special Retreat Where It Secretly Tries To ‘Cure’ Gay Priests?

Add this to the Vatican’s latest spate of PR disasters surrounding homosexuality and same-sex marriage. 

A former priest who says he was fired for being gay revealed on Monday that the Vatican maintains a former convent in northern Italy where it secretly sends priests to “cure” them of homosexuality. This news comes after Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, a high-ranking priest who worked in the Vatican, was fired after he came out as gay on Friday – the eve of the Catholic Church’s synod on the family. The Vatican blamed not his homosexuality but his “irresponsible” timing for the sacking. (And, of course, there was the Kim Davis meet-and-greet with Pope Francis.)

“There exists a convent where priests who manifest inappropriate sexual tendencies are sent to reflect,” Mario Bonfanti the former priest, told an Italian newspaper, La Repubblica. “It’s a place where they help you to rediscover the straight and narrow. They wanted to ‘cure’ me but I refused to go,” the 44-year-old added.

That former convent, in Trento, known as the Venturini Institute, “was set up in 1928 by Father Paolo Venturini to offer residential accommodation for clergy who suffer from any number of maladies from depression and addiction to pedophilic urges,” the Daily Beast reports. 

Bonfanti, who says he refused the Vatican’s direction to go to the Venturini Institute, and was let go even though he says he was not in a relationship, says the facility offers “treatment” for homosexuality to get priests “back on track.”

The head of the Institute, Father Gianluigi Pasto, says, “We don’t speak of our work but it is well known to many bishops and dioceses. They know what we can offer.”

Pasto did acknowledge, according to the Telegraph, that priests can visit if they are suffering from depression, alcoholism, or “problems connected to sex.”

“Priests come to us for a period of formation and personal reflection. At the moment we have neither gay priests nor paedophile priests here. Certainly our job is to welcome everybody,” Pasto offered.

Calling the atmosphere at the Institute, “extraordinarily sinister,” the Daily Beast detailed a horrific episode.

“In 1983, an elderly homosexual priest by the name of Armando Bison, who was there for ‘treatment,’ was killed in a bizarre incident during which two men drove a wooden crucifix into his skull.”

“Of course,” writes Barbie Latza Nadeau, who reports from Italy for the Daily Beast, “the environment is more civilized now, but Bonfante says that priests who came out as gay in Italy before Pope Francis was elected in 2013 were sent to the Venturini institute to be treated with a type of multi-faceted ‘retraining’ that mixes psychoanalysis with meditative prayer.”

In other words, harmful “conversion,” “reparative,” or “ex-gay” therapy.

 

Image by Jeffrey Bruno/Aleteia via Flickr and a CC license