Don Malù. A "street" priest who walks with LGBTQ people

Dialogue by Katya Parente With Don Marco Luca Bertani

He is a particular priest. His name is Marco Luca Bertani - for friends Don Malù. Why particular? Because he follows his heart, a heart full of love and compassion (in the etymological sense of the term). One for which the sequence of Christ is not filling his mouth of beautiful words, but being really next to the others.

An outgoing priest, as Pope Francis would say. A "street" Don, who walks with LGBTQ people to make them feel at home in a church that often more than being a mother is a stepmother. But let's leave the word to him.

Who is Don Malù?

Don Malù is a universe of many things. I don't like definitions very much if they do not keep open to an evolutionary perspective. So Don Malù who is? Today he is a queer person, a :) Eccentric :) open artist :) to the life and wonders of the human journey, a being in evolution, a person who is held open to the beauty of this world and the always present challenge of a flowering and a human resurrection. He is a priest, an LGBTQIA+ and ... and much more activist.

How does your itinerant ministry materialize?

It takes the form of it very simply in trying to give time, listening, welcome, closeness and that concrete love of the Lord, experienced firsthand, to the people who contact me, meeting, accompany, with whom I travel a piece of road. Nothing simpler and more precious than putting myself alongside those who ask me to put my heart close to his to take a few steps together in this wonderful journey, at times even tiring, which is life.

Welcome and revolution. There were only a few steps in this direction, a kind of facade refresh. Do you agree?

I think the question is not in overturning or destroying what is already there! But in always keeping yourself available to let yourself be renewed by the reforming and regenerating power of the Gospel. Return to the heart of God. That God who created us wonderfully unique and keeps his arms wide open to welcome everyone, none excluded. That God who wants a flowering for each of us in what we are and not in what one should be (for logics of human limitation).

The first great reform I think must start from yourself. To be able to welcome other people and be able to collaborate in a reform, of any nature it may be, it is necessary first to learn to reform and welcome yourself in one's own personal and intimate immense wonder.

Why enter a group that ostracts you? Don't you seem to fight against the windmills?

Everyone makes his choices in life and every life has his challenges. I don't think they exist perfect places. There are places! Places in which we find ourselves, in which we choose for a thousand reasons to stay and streets that we decide to travel, places in which we find ourselves in our brief existence to walk, in which we are called to leave the testimony of our passage.

To us decide what kind of footprint to give in our passage. Now I am here and here I want to be a living part of a journey of reform, a small match of light for the hearts I encounter.

How do you see yourself, let's say, in about ten years? And how do you see the Church?

I don't know where and how I will be and I don't even know where and how the Church will be. It would be a little pretentious to know. I hope about it! In evolution! In this process of resurrection started by a God who showed us the way more than two thousand years ago.

Thanks to Don Malù, in the hope that the clergy really efforts to put into practice the new commandment of Jesus, love.