VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) – A celebrity Argentine nun who is a close friend of Pope Francis has implied that the Vatican’s doctrinal czar may be homosexual.
A cookery television show presented by Sr. Caram
“I believe that he [Pope Francis] has taken steps that have never before been taken. This, up until now, the pope has received and is a friend of gays, of trans; he is giving them a voice,” Sr. María Lucía Caram Padilla told television presenter Jorge Javier Vázquez.
“Let us not forget that in one of the most important dicasteries, in the whole area of safeguarding, he has put someone who is homosexual; he put him in a Vatican position,” the nun revealed on the Spanish Cuentos Chinos program hosted on the Telecinco channel on Sept. 18.
Sister Caram did not name Cdl. Víctor Manuel Fernández, a controversial fellow Argentinian who was appointed prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith by Pope Francis on July 1 and elevated to the cardinalate on Sept. 30.
Commentators, however, noted that the Vatican’s DDF is considered to be the Vatican’s most important dicastery. It is also the Vatican’s department dealing with safeguarding and enforcing disciplinary measures, both in doctrine and in the case of abusive priests.
Francis has made only two recent top appointments to dicasteries of lesser importance. In Nov. 2022, he appointed Italian archbishop Claudio Gugerotti as prefect of the Dicastery for the Oriental Churches and appointed American prelate Robert Prevost as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops in Jan. 2023.
Neither dicasteries deal with safeguarding from abuse. Moreover, commentators have suggested that Sr. Caram is in a better position to have inside information about a fellow Argentinian.
In the interview, Sr. Caram added, “My best friend is gay. He’s Juan Carlos Cruz, who is a global LGTBI leader.”
Alternatively, commentators have suggested that the nun may have been referring to Cruz, who has been appointed to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
On the television show, Vázquez, a television host who flaunts his ideological position and sexuality as “rojo y maricon” (Spanish for “red and queer”), asked the Dominican nun if she “would be in favor of homosexuals being married by the Church.”
“I would be in favor of them being able to be married by the Church because God always blesses love,” Sr. Caram emphasized.
When Vázquez pressed the nun on the question of whether the pope would agree to let homosexual couples “marry” provided they remained chaste and did not engage in sexual relations, Sr. Caram replied, “The pope has not said that, I believe.”
The host then asked Caram if she believed that homosexuals who had sexual relations were committing a sin.
Pope Francis welcomes Sr. Caram to the Vatican
“To commit a sin is a complicated thing,” the nun replied. “[It means] you want to do something bad.”
Asked to respond with a “yes” or “no,” Sr. Caram shot back, “What do you want me to say? … They haven’t taken the vow of celibacy that I have made.”
In 2017, the nun with over 193,000 followers on Twitter, was forced to apologize after outraging Catholics by claiming that Mary had sex with Joseph. Caram claims she received death threats after contradicting Catholic teaching on the perpetual virginity of Mary.
“I think Mary was in love with Joseph and that they were a normal couple — and having sex is a normal thing,” she told the Chester in Love show.
“It’s hard to believe and hard to take in. We’ve ended up with the rules we’ve invented without getting to the true message,” she added.
The Argentine-born nun who lives in a Catalan convent later clarified her statement, saying, “When asked about the Virgin Mary, I said that, as I see it, Mary obviously loved Joseph … I wanted to say that it wouldn’t shock me if she had had a normal couple’s relationship with Joseph, her husband.”