Italy: The Scandal of Don Gallo’s Funeral
Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) and archbishop of Genoa, celebrated the funeral mass of Don Andrea Gallo (on the picture), a priest of the diocese of Genoa, who died on May 22, at the age of 84. During the press conference at the end of the CEI’s annual assembly, the cardinal had announced that he would celebrate Don Gallo’s funeral, “as I do for all my priests; a rule is not an exception.”
In France, the Communist newspaper L’Humanité painted the portrait of the deceased priest in its May 24, 2013 edition: “His faithful hat and his chapka will no longer grace the parades of the Italian left. The priest Don Andrea Gallo passed away on Wednesday, May 22, at the age of 84. He was a figure of the progressivist camp that is not doing so well today. He was at all the great protests, but in the street, he frequented above all the excluded, the prostitutes and the drug addicts of Genoa. (...) Several times he took up a position in favor of homosexuals.” In the community of San Egidio, he was called “the priest of the last”, and he called himself the “street priest”.
During his funeral mass in the Carmelite Church in Genoa, Cardinal Bagnasco’s homily was interrupted by “the song Bella Ciao, taken up by the congregation amidst applause,” reported Il Messagero. “Celebrating Don Gallo’s funeral means, above all, accepting ahead of time a botched liturgical scenario, that will look more like a political-revolutionary manifestation than the sacrifice of Christ,” wrote Alessandro Gnocchi and Mario Palmero on the website Corrispondenza Romana.
The climax, they pointed out, was “when the cardinal gave communion to Vladimiro Guadagno, better known under the “transgender” name Vladimir Luxuria, a person with an obvious moral problem, known to all, a person who is not only in error, like all the sinners of this world, but who theorizes the moral legitimacy of his objective error, which he has been ostentatiously exhibiting for years.”
The Society of St. Pius X’s district superior of Italy, Don Pierpaolo Petrucci denounced the scandal of this funeral in an open letter, recalling – among other points – that Don Gallo notoriously helped women to abort and that he publicly declared himself a Communist. And he concluded: “Such behavior (from the ecclesiastical authorities) shows ever more clearly the serious crisis that the Church is going through, and the betrayal of the most elementary principles of Catholic morality by important members of the hierarchy.”
(sources: Avvenire/Radio vaticana/Humanité/Il Messagero/Corrispondeza Romana/sanpiox.it – DICI#276 June 7, 2013)
