Vatican Archbishop Retweets Image of Naked Adults Surrounded by Naked Children

Can't blame Francis for this one. JPII made him a Bishop, and Benedict made him President of the Pontifical Council for the Family and raised him to the rank of archbishop.

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The image from a film about marriage shows a naked man and woman lying on the ground surrounded by naked children

ITALY, July 16, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – A prominent Vatican archbishop, infamous for commissioning a homoerotic mural to be painted in his Cathedral, retweeted today an image of a naked man and woman lying on the ground surrounded by naked children.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, chancellor of the new John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences in Rome and the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, retweeted a post that originated from the John Paul II Institute. The original post was part of a promotion of a broadcast featuring film director Alessandro D'Alatri. The film director was behind the 2002 film Casomai, which according to the John Paul II Institute’s web page promoting the broadcast, is “used today in all premarital courses.” 

“Today at ‘Now airing Gp2' we will talk about cinema and family with Alessandro D'Alatri, winner of four awards at the festival @PopoliReligioni,” wrote Paglia’s in a retweet [WARNING: Link goes to image of naked adults, children] as translated from its original Italian to English. 

Pixelated screenshot of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia's retweet of the image of naked adults with naked kids.

The image shows two actors of the film Casomai, Fabio Volo, and Stefania Rocca, lying down naked with one arm holding up their heads. They are surrounded by four naked children, who appear to be male and of a similar age. The actors are posed in such a way to mostly cover intimate parts of the body.  

Casomai is a film revolving around two lovers who marry in a rural church where the priest questions the couple about the “lasting power of relationships.” It is told in flashback sequences that portray the ups and downs of their marriage. 

This is not the first time Paglia has been involved in a controversy involving images of naked people.

The archbishop was featured in a homoerotic painting he commissioned in his Cathedral. 

The massive mural covers the opposite side of the facade of the cathedral church of the Diocese of Terni-Narni-Amelia. It depicts Jesus carrying nets to heaven filled with naked and semi-nude homosexuals, transsexuals, prostitutes, and drug dealers, jumbled together in erotic interactions.

As reported by LifeSite’s Matthew Hoffman in 2017, “included in one of the nets is Paglia, the then diocesan bishop. The image of the Savior is painted with the face of a local male hairdresser, and his private parts can be seen through his translucent garb.”

The Archbishop defended the homoerotic mural which shows him reaching out in affection to a semi-naked man, saying it serves as an “evangelizing” tool.

Catholic critics were quick to blast the mural as "disgusting” and as blasphemous.”

  

Paglia also oversaw the release of a controversial sex-ed program during the 2016 World Youth Day in Poland that includes sexually explicit images. The course was  criticized as being “thoroughly immoral.” 

The archbishop has defended giving Holy Communion to adulterers, has been instrumental in gutting and remaking the John Paul II Institute according to the pulse of the Francis pontificate, has asserted that priests may legitimately remain at the bedside of someone undergoing assisted suicide in order to “hold their hand” and “accompany” them, and has claimed that anyone who says Judas Iscariot is in hell is a heretic.

U.S. psychiatrist Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons, a counseling center director who has been a consultant to the Congregation for the Clergy at the Vatican and has served as adjunct professor at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America, stated in 2016 in the wake of the Vatican sex-ed program that Archbishop Paglia should be evaluated by sex abuse review board.

Paglia “should be required in justice to go through an evaluation by a review board as described in the Dallas Charter norms for placing youth at risk,” Fitzgibbons wrote. “Such a review is particularly important as he is now been put in charge of further teaching regarding sexuality and marriage at the John Paul II Institute for Family Studies.”

Fitzgibbons at the time strongly condemned the Vatican’s sex education program as abusive, saying it was “the most dangerous threat to Catholic youth” he had seen in the past 40 years.