Pope Francis explains 'who am I to judge?' comment
In July 2013, three months after his election as pontiff, Pope Francis made comments during a press conference on the plane returning to the Vatican from Rio de Janeiro after the first apostolic visit of his papacy. Speaking in Italian, he responded to a question from Brazilian journalist, Ilze Scamparini, about a priest with same sex attraction [Monsignor Ricca] and the influence of the "gay lobby". Francis' answer was a paragraph in length, yet most media only reported one sentence: "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?" The statement set off a frenzy of commentary and speculation without context or perspective. The New York Times expressed the sentiments of a majority of the fourth estate noting: Francis’s words could not have been more different from those of Benedict XVI, who in 2005 wrote that homosexuality was "a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil," and an "objecti