"My appeal to the Italian Synod as a former gay seminarian: the Catholic Church does not exclude"
Interview by Fabrizio Caccia published in the newspaper The Corriere della Sera April 5, 2025
Rosario Lo Negro, 27 years old, a philosophy student at the San Raffaele University of Milan, member of the National Committee of the Synodal Way and the Association "Lgbtq+Christian young Christian project", is one of the 51 lay people who intervened in the Vatican against the final document of the Synod, then withdrawn from the assembly and postponed to next October.
He had a nice courage.
"Tuesday morning, in the classroom Paul VI, my legs trembled: I was the first member to speak, I had a thousand delegates in front of us and the Cardinal Matteo Zuppi and the archbishop Erio Castellucci, sitting at the table of the Presidency of the Synod of the CEI, who stared at me in silence."
Nevertheless…
«I had two minutes available for the intervention, so I had to tighten, but what I wanted to say I said. After 4 years of preparatory works, the proposition number 5 arrives and I read: "Accompaniment of people in particular affective situations". That is, I would be in this bad situation, according to them? "
Is it ironic?
"But why not call LGBTQ+ people by name? We are inside the Church, we are not outside. We need recognition, participation. And there is no need to accompany us, because we are very capable of moving alone. I myself have participated in many retreats, moments of prayer and training together with doctors, theologians, psychologists. "
Did you feel injured?
«Injured no, because I have now made the call to ecclesial terminology. Even Pope Francis, when he talked about "froculinous", could save it. I was bad for it, yes, as in front of the compendium of the catechism of the Catholic Church of Benedict XVI who read at 13 years: there we were talking about homosexual acts as "intrinsically disordered".
Very hard words, so much so that I wondered if I was in the wrong place, if my condition was wrong. So, years later, I also entered the seminary in Agrigento to look for an answer to my doubts. It was 2017, but I found myself in a new nightmare called "reparative or conversion therapies". In short, they wanted to "heal" me! I left the seminary. "
Its history was also taken up by the BBC.
«That's why I say that almost 10 years later I expected much more than a paternalistic" accompaniment ", a concept that also returns to proposition number 3 for people with disabilities. And of women, do we want to talk about it? "
Let's talk.
«Women in the life of parishes are a majority, not a minority. There are more catechists than catechists, yet in the roles of responsibility, men are almost always called. Also on the abuses, then, in the document there were few irrelevant words.
Never refers to the ecclesial responsibility for the non -compensation of the victims, of the omerous silence and the coverage of the abusers. Instead, the emphasis on partial and inefficient tools, which do not arouse the trust of those who have been abused, me first. "
Serious words.
«Yet I was applauded and so, if I had entered, I left with a different consciousness, because the Church eventually received the synodality of Pope Francis in full. The document has been withdrawn and it is beautiful, from secular, to feel me co -responsible for the choices that the Church can make. "
