Pride month special: should we forgive the pope for using a homophobic slur?

Once, twice, three times a frociaggine

In the new season of Slate’s history podcast Slow Burn, the story of California’s 1978 Briggs amendment starts to feel very timely. A conservative politician from Orange County named John Briggs decided that gay teachers posed a threat to the state’s children, so he attempted to rally voters to pass an amendment to ban them from the classroom.

In one of the recent episodes, Hollywood’s liberal elite decided to push back, staging a concert billed as being for “human rights,” but really about raising awareness of gay rights. California was certainly ahead of most of America on the issue, but 1978 was 1978, and most people weren’t even out of the closet yet.

The concert organizers invited Richard Pryor, one of America’s most popular and controversial comedians, to perform a set. Pryor wasn’t aware of the concert’s gay rights message, and when he found out about it backstage, he was reportedly startled. He took the stage and launched into a set that began with a series of jokes about his own experiences of gay sex, and what he admitted was good gay sex at that — something most of the audience was not aware of.

Pretty quickly, however, Pryor’s tone shifted, and he started calling out the “f*ggots” in the audience for failing to support Black causes. Pyror had something of a point: the gay rights movement at that juncture was overwhelmingly made up of white men, but repeating the word f*ggott over and over again led the audience to start booing him. They wouldn’t stop. By the time Tom Waits took the stage to follow Pryor, his set was drowned out by the audience and he only made it through two songs.

You may have heard that in late May, Pope Francis recently used the word “frociaggine” in a closed-door meeting at the Vatican. “Frociaggine” loosely translates to something like “f*ggotry,” and the pope was using the term to describe the climate in Italian seminaries. Someone in the meeting leaked this to the Italian press, and it became international news pretty quickly. The Vatican spin machine went into overdrive, issuing a statement that said the pope “never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms,” and that he apologized to “those who felt offended.”

But on June 11, reports surfaced that the pope used “frociaggine” a second time in a different meeting. At this point, I really started to feel sorry for my gay colleagues who cover the Catholic church, because you can spin the first use as a one-time mistake, but the second use reveals something most of us already knew: that the so called “welcoming,” “progressive” pope is really just another old man who doesn’t like gay people very much, even though he’s surrounded by them.

Image via AP.

It’s no secret that there are plenty of gay Catholic priests. The history of Catholic seminaries is full of frociaggine. And the pope, who ran a Jesuit seminary in Argentina, has been around frociaggine for most of his 87 years. One excuse offered up was that he’s not a native Italian speaker and that in his native Argentina, he was probably more used to hearing (and perhaps using) “maricón,” which means roughly the same thing. But the pope has been spending plenty of time in Italy and speaking Italian since he was made the Jesuit superior general in Argentina in 1973. That’s five decades of hearing (and maybe using) the word frociaggine. The difference is that this time, someone snitched on him for doing it, and they snitched twice.

The Briggs Amendment didn’t pass in 1978, but in 2008, Archbishop Salvator Cordelione of San Francisco was one of the main backers of Proposition 8, a ban on same sex marriage which did pass. Proposition 8 was overturned two years later, but Cordelione would go on to try and add a “morality” clause to San Francisco Catholic teachers’ contracts in 2015 so that gay teachers could be more easily dismissed. This was rejected by the teachers themselves, but it was yet another reminder that even in queer-loving blue states like California, the Catholic church will do just about anything to rid itself of those pesky gay people.

But, once again, the hypocrisy screams out. Catholics have frociaggine saints, we pray in churches built by frociaggine architects, we recite frociaggine prayers written by cardinals and some popes were probably frociaggine too. Of course, the way we understand what it means to be gay today doesn’t always apply in a historical context, but same sex attraction and gender fluidity have always existed, and people have always found ways to insult and belittle those who feel it. I don’t know if Pope Francis himself is gay, but he certainly has gay friends in the church. So why is it a problem for him to refer to seminarians as frociaggine?

It’s a problem because of the way he’s using the language. When Pryor got onstage in 1978 and used the word “f*ggott,” he wasn’t using it to describe himself, even though he’d had gay sexual experiences. He was using it to punch down, and even if he did have a valid point about the gay rights movement failing to show up en masse to support Black people, he just kept repeating it because he saw and heard how people reacted with outrage and hurt. The pope apologized (or issued a press release apologizing), but when he said it again, he was sending the same message: we don’t want frociaggine seminarians because that means frociaggine priests which means the whole church is frociaggine.

I’ve lived in the Bay Area my entire life, and have spent plenty of time around gay men who call one another “f*ggots” with some frequency. Like “queer,” it’s a slur the community reclaimed, and communities get to decide what kind of language they use for one another. But I wouldn’t call one of my gay friends up and say “hey, f*aggott” because it’s not my terminology to use. As a cisgender straight person, the only reason I use “queer” is because queer people have told me they prefer it as an umbrella term over the arguably unwieldier mouthful of LGBTQIA+¹, but if someone says “hey, that makes me uncomfortable,” it’s my job to stop, not their job to keep reminding me to do so. When I was one of a handful of white people at hip hop shows in Oakland in the early 1990s and saw other white people mouthing the n word my only thought was that it’s just poor fucking judgement and ignorance on your part to do so, and that’s the same thing I think today about majority groups using minority language. You’re not reclaiming shit. You’re just hurting people’s feelings because you can get away with it.

Pride month is so mainstream now that it feels like just another excuse for corporations to make money off of marginalized communities, much like Target selling Black Lives Matter shirts or the slew of “feminist” junk targeted at women in 2016. And the Catholic church’s inherent homophobia, much of it just the self-hatred that breeds in the closet, seems increasingly irrelevant as the church shrinks and hemorrhages membership.

But calling people frociaggine has consequences, even today, and I’ve seen it impact people I deeply care for, along with people who’s stories will break your heart if you have any modicum of human feelings. A priest at my old parish was removed by the Bishop of Oakland for coming out, which led me to leave that church, and I’ve never really found another one. A gay friend who was in seminary had ordination delayed by a different bishop, a decision that was painful and hurtful. In 2019, Alana Chen, a queer Catholic who wanted to be a nun, was told by a priest that she needed conversion therapy. That conversion therapy failed to change her attraction to women, and she died by suicide in 2019.

So should we forgive the pope for using a homophobic slur? Maybe if he used it once, maybe if it was a mistake, maybe if he hadn’t also repeatedly complained about “gender ideology” and the acceptance of queer people representing the danger of “ideological colonization”, maybe then we could forgive it all as ignorance or as a mistake. But when you repeat a slur and you use it to demean, diminish or punish, that’s as deliberate as a white person saying the n word with a hard r at the end. And that is not only unforgivable, I’d argue it’s a sin. And to paraphrase Kendrick Lamar, a sinner is probably going to sin again.

1. Lately I’ve been hearing the queer community use “alphabet people” which, as a writer, I find delightful.