Yayo Grassi, left, and his partner, Iwan, meeting with Pope Francis at the Apostolic Nunciature on Sept. 23.
Posted on 10/09/2015 6:23:34 PM PDT by ebb tide
Yayo Grassi, left, and his partner, Iwan, meeting with Pope Francis at the Apostolic Nunciature on Sept. 23. (Marisa Marchitelli) Yayo Grassi’s phone rang in early September.
“Is this Obdulio?” said the caller, using a nickname given to Grassi 50 years earlier by a high school teacher.
“Who is this?” said Grassi, spooked.
“Who else calls you ‘Obdulio’?”
“Only one person,” Grassi said, “and I’m not going to talk until you identify yourself.”
“This is Jorge Mario Bergoglio,” the pope said, using his given name, according to Grassi. “I would like to give you a hug when I go to D.C.”
That hug — between the leader of the Catholic Church and a lifelong friend who is gay — came Sept. 23 at the Apostolic Nunciature during the pope’s first visit to the United States. Grassi put on a bright-blue checked blazer, brought along his boyfriend of nearly two decades, and embraced his former teacher in a sunlit parlor of the Vatican embassy.
This quiet meeting came to light Friday, after the Vatican — responding to questions about the pope’s meeting with Kim Davis, the controversial Kentucky county clerk jailed for refusing to approve same-sex marriage licenses — clarified that hers was only one of many “brief greetings” within a larger audience on his visit to the Vatican’s embassy.
[Pope Francis met with a same-sex couple the day before he met with Kim Davis]
“The only real audience granted by the pope at the Nunciature,” said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, head of the Holy See press office, “was with one of his former students and his family.”
Pope Francis had a private meeting with a same-sex couple during his visit to Washington, D.C. in September. The pope, who used to be a teacher, met with a former student and his partner. (Marisa Marchitelli)
That student was Grassi, 67, and that family was his boyfriend, Iwan.
The embassy visit lasted about 15 minutes and consisted mostly of pleasantries.
“We have taken up too much of your time,” Grassi said, after the pope blessed three of Grassi’s friends and asked them to pray for him, in Spanish in a video of the pope's visit.
“No, by God,” the pope said, “thanks for coming by.” He then hugged Grassi, kissed his boyfriend twice on the cheek and said goodbye to the group.
Grassi and Francis first met in their native Argentina, at Inmaculada Concepción high school in Santa Fe, where the future pope was a teacher.
On Friday afternoon, a few hours after CNN broke the news of his papal audience, Grassi was cooking Argentine-style beef tenderloin at his home in LeDroit Park in Northwest Washington. His cellphone and land line were ringing off the hook.
A team from ABC News was at the door in the rain, but Grassi politely shooed them away.
The caterer had to prepare a dinner for 25 at the Phillips Collection by 4:30 p.m.
But he was willing to chat for a couple of minutes about a friendship that he considers sacred. It began in 1964 and 1965, when Bergoglio taught Grassi Argentine literature and psychology.
“He was an extraordinary teacher and a great mentor,” Grassi said, turning off his buzzing iPhone and lighting a Dunhill cigarette. “He kept pushing my horizons, to oblige me to keep looking. He asked me to put on the skin of my fellow man, to feel their pain.”
Grassi’s mother used to cook gnocchi for Bergoglio when he visited the family home in Parana. Grassi, who learned to cook from his mother, has operated his own D.C. catering business since 2005. Before that he was the director of catering for the National Gallery of Art. Grassi moved to the District in 1978 and lost touch with his teacher until 2008, when then-Cardinal Bergoglio granted him an audience in Buenos Aires.
Bergoglio became pope five years later, and Grassi reached out to Francis ahead of his first trip to the United States. A meeting was planned for Sept. 23.
When news broke this week about Davis’s visit, Grassi decided to speak out.
[Why no one wants to talk about how the Pope Francis-Kim Davis meeting was arranged]
“Although I didn’t know any details, I knew immediately that [Francis] had nothing to do with this, that this was arranged by other people without telling him the real character” of Davis, Grassi said in his kitchen, checking on the tenderloin. “I received, from friends of mine, a lot of quite disturbing mail, telling me that: ‘This is your pope, look what he did,’ and ‘He’s a coward.’ And my defense is, we don’t know anything. Just wait until things come out. And I’m extremely pleased that I was right. And I never had any doubt that I was right.”
The Vatican was far less definitive, and it described the meeting as a routine visit between friends.
Grassi, Lombardi said, “had already met other times in the past with the pope” and asked to introduce “several friends to the pope during the pope’s stay in Washington, D.C. As noted in the past, the pope, as pastor, has maintained many personal relationships with people in a spirit of kindness, welcome and dialogue.”
[Who’s that with Pope Francis? The seven kinds of people you meet in a papal entourage.]
The Vatican on Friday similarly played down the significance of the Davis visit, which opponents of same-sex marriage had hailed as validation of their cause. The Vatican said the meeting was initiated by the papal embassy — not Francis himself — and was not meant as an endorsement of all of Davis’s actions and views.
In 2010, when Francis was still a cardinal in Argentina, Grassi read media reports that his former teacher had condemned the country’s legalization of same-sex marriage. So he sent a long e-mail to the cardinal expressing his disappointment as a gay man.
“I stood firm on my position,” Grassi said of what he wrote. “And I ended the e-mail saying: ‘Don’t think it was easy for me to write this e-mail, but I had to do it. And I think it was the right thing to do because 40 years ago you taught me I had to do it.’ ”
The cardinal — who as pope would respond, “Who am I to judge?” when asked about gay priests — responded that his words had been cherry-picked and twisted by the media, according to Grassi, and that the reported sentiment was not true.
“He wrote back to me, telling me, first of all, how sorry he was that he had hurt my feelings, that he had hurt me,” Grassi said. “One of the things he said on that e-mail was that ‘I want you to know that in my work there is absolutely no place for homophobia.’ And I think that’s what I want people to know.”
With that, the alarm for the tenderloin began to beep, and it was back to work.
I’m getting tired of this “Fairy” tale.
Gee, what else should we expect from a homosexual pope?
Throughout my career in graphics, I worked with probably 30 or more gay guys.
I never wanted to give any of them a hug.
I was polite to them, even went to some gay worker’s party because alot of the hot girls in the office were going. (i’ll never forget that apartment or the gay couple’s outfits)
Had to hear some nauseating stories about their sick sex lives because we were in the open, not in cubicles.
I wouldn’t hug one with radiation protective gear on.
Jesus did associate with sinners.
But he did not sin.
He dined with them.
But he did not condone their sins.
He rebuked their sins.
He witnessed the gospel to them, that He was the Son of God, that he would die for their sins.
And in gratitude, sinners should try their best to turn away from sin.
Not sanctify their sin by applying God’s sacrament of marriage to it.
This pope is a wolf in shepherd’s clothing.
And his family!
Did his mom or dad come too? His brother or sister? Uncle, aunt, cousin?
I can tell you the last time I tried to pass off a pal as family, it went over like a lead balloon.
Oh Pastor Bergoglio. Jesus wept.
Yayo Grassi, left, and his partner, Iwan, meeting with Pope Francis at the Apostolic Nunciature on Sept. 23.
How many aids did he go through before reaching the Pope?
The Pope of Niceness.
This is not going to end well.
So am I. After a terrorist killed Christans in Oregon.....our minister had Communion last week and talked about welcoming gays. I was flabbergasted.
Poor fellow, blindsided by a nuncio who dared to assume he would care about more conventional Christian values.
More homosexual BS.
That’s one thing about this political victory of theirs. It’s showing where the political sympathies are in the church. Had the Court gone the other way, a lot of clergy would just hold its tongue, having no social movement to eulogize.
I’m fine with doing away with all church offenses to the “gay” as long as it stops before doing away with the offense of Christ. Christ is there saying hey guys, I didn’t make you to be that way, this is the devil’s prank on you, I love you more than you could ever imagine, and that’s why I want you not to be doing it but to learn what love My way means. And clergy are like “Jesus, just shut up about that, we would have a great thing going.”
This thread is about Catholics and the Pope, but the issue spans across all Christendom.
I’d like to see him offer a hug to some of their victims, like the Sweet Cakes bakery people or the Huenins in New Mexico or Jack Philips in Colorado.
Maybe some of the kids taken to the Folsom Street Fair, or the poor kid made to be Grand Marshall of the Gay Parade.
Maybe the firefighters forced to be in a float in that parade. Or the many of us now enjoying the transgender so called bathroom privileges of perverted men.
Not holding my breath I guess.
“The only real audience granted by the pope at the Nunciature,” said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, head of the Holy See press office, “was with one of his former students and his family.”
That "family" being the homosexual "couple".
Unless he brought some other kinfolk along, how could it POSSIBLY be anything else?
your point is????
Sorry. Didn’t mean to tread.
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