There is an elementary principle which, in recent years, we have found ourselves having to repeat far too often: a priest’s private life is private, just like anyone else’s, and is not a matter for public discussion. It may sound obvious, yet it has to be repeated every time, because the subject greatly appeals to certain repressed individuals and, sadly, also to several priests who seem capable of little more than peering into other people’s underwear.
That principle does not change in the slightest even when it is trampled upon in court. The fact that certain hacks, repressed priests or young men expelled from seminaries think they can talk about other people’s private lives simply because they get away with it before a judge does not make what they do legitimate: it merely says what kind of country they live in. If, then, in this banana republic, there are magistrates with barely a primary-school education who are unable to understand that a priest’s private life is, precisely, private, the problem remains intact, but it remains theirs. After all, Italy is now a country the whole world laughs at when it comes to politics and justice, and the rulings against it from the European Court of Human Rights are no longer even countable. The difference between those who trade in gossip and those who do serious work is measured precisely here. Those who speak only about sex and behind-the-scenes intrigue are the ones who love gossip. Those who focus on the roots of the problem, and respect the private dimension of other people’s lives, are doing journalism.
In recent weeks we have brought to light a situation that has been going on for years inside the Holy See Press Office. Our attention has not focused on the relationships as such, which interest us little and belong to the internal forum: it has focused on the effects those relationships produce on work and on the workplace. This is the problem, and this is what must not happen. At home, and outside the office, do what you like. In the office, no: because there your personal choices cease to be merely personal and begin to weigh on the whole structure.
For almost all readers, the point was clear from the outset: the problem is not the relationship, but what the relationship produces in the working environment. As usual, however, there are many voices from those who speak and few from those who truly listen to what we are saying. Anyone who claims that we focused on gossip about the private lives of the people involved is saying a great deal about himself and about what he is capable of reading and seeing with his own eyes. About our work, and about what we actually wrote, he is saying little or nothing.
The tragedy of emotional immaturity
Today, however, we want to go further and touch on another aspect which is, unfortunately, very common within this micro-State which, in its dynamics, resembles a small country village in every respect: everyone knows everyone, everyone talks, few know anything, everyone gossips. And many see this small State not as a place of service, but as a status, a privileged condition in which they can finally feel like someone. That is why people aspire to enter it, to be photographed, to display passes, titles and access. The issue we want to address concerns a problem as common as it is deep-rooted, and not only here: it concerns the Catholic Church as a whole.
When a scandal emerges, we treat it as an isolated moral fact. We activate procedures, we manage the crisis, and in recent years we have even become dependent on newspapers: we no longer prevent, we react. If the newspaper talks about it, then we intervene. Otherwise, no. Think of the priest who is dependent on alcohol, or the one who lives with an emotional loneliness he does not know how to name: when is there intervention? When the bomb goes off. Never before, because before that we do not ask where that symptom comes from, nor do we go far enough back to discover it.
And yet addictions - to substances, to behaviours, to relationships - are almost never the problem. They are the last visible link in a chain that begins long before ordination, and at whose centre lies a humanity that has not been properly faced and integrated. An unintegrated emotional life, to use the expression that has now entered the language of formation.
The root: a humanity not faced and integrated
Many candidates reach ordination with emotional, sexual and identity-related areas that have never really had the chance to be processed. This is not a matter of bad will, either on the part of the candidates or of the formators. It is a matter of a system which, historically, has privileged behavioural conformity over integrated maturation: it checks that the candidate “holds up”, not always that he has truly confronted what he is choosing. Celibacy is therefore assumed as a formal decision before it has been made one’s own as a conscious emotional choice.
In this sense, what happens in many formation communities and even dioceses at the level of judgement is symptomatic. It is somehow considered “acceptable” for a priest to have an occasional sexual encounter and then cut it off because it is sinful, but a lasting relationship is not tolerated, and is immediately labelled as an “affair”. The consequence is predictable, and it is the one we see: disposable relationships are preferred, “since one can always go to confession afterwards”, rather than stable bonds that would expose one to the judgement and action of the community. And so, in quite a few cases, beneath the reassuring formula of the male or female collaborator in the parish, in the curia, in the diocese, there are in reality full relationships. With a higher degree of toxicity than an ordinary “affair”, because they are lived within an emotional immaturity that prevents things from being called by their proper name.
In these cases, immaturity is almost always present on both sides. These are stories that come to light when they break down: the female collaborator who reports matters when the relationship ends or when the working relationship is interrupted; the male collaborator who presents himself at the curia saying that he has suffered abuse. They are often people with fragile personal journeys, with a difficulty in accepting themselves which the priest, in turn, has not resolved within himself. This does not lessen the seriousness of what happens: it aggravates it, because it shows us how far, within the presbyterate, we struggle to build healthy and equal relationships. We seek them where they cannot be such, with people who cannot be equals, and we all come out wounded. Sperry and Rossetti, in more than twenty years of clinical work with priests, have called this phenomenon developmental immaturity: not mistaken vocations, but journeys that stop too early. Ordained men who still have to complete, after ordination, work that should have been done beforehand. Because the problem is not the relationship: the problem is the immaturity that runs through it.
The condition that amplifies it: loneliness and asymmetry
To this terrain, ministerial life adds a structure that amplifies fragilities instead of compensating for them. The priest lives immersed in relationships that are constitutively asymmetrical: the faithful, penitents, collaborators, employees, young people seeking someone to listen to them. Truly equal relationships - with peers, with sincere fellow priests, with free and disinterested lay friendships - require an active effort that many are unable to make, or do not know how to make, or are not encouraged to make. Celibacy in itself is not the problem: the problem is celibacy lived in emotional isolation, in the absence of equal bonds in which one’s humanity can continue to mature. When a non-integrated humanity encounters this structural loneliness, the ground is laid for wounds to seek, sooner or later, an outlet.
The issue emerged a few months ago, when a young priest left the ministry. Without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we must recognise that correct insights, worthy of being heard, can come even from those who choose ways and styles we do not share. This does not mean that all priests live this condition: it means that the phenomenon is widespread, and it is better to address it than to pretend otherwise. Fortunately there are those who were formed well, who sought and followed serious paths beyond the seminary, and who live their maturity in a healthy way. But precisely for them, as well as for the others, it is worth saying how things really stand.
Some common deviations
Think of the mechanism by which many appointments are assigned within this State. They happen largely by co-option, and this opens the door to dynamics that we should look at for what they are. A section director in a dicastery who has an “emotional bond” with a male or female collaborator takes that person with him everywhere: in transfers, in changes of appointment, in new roles. He moves, and the other person moves with him. Marriages, engagements, official bonds into which they have inserted themselves count for nothing or very little. Behind certain formally irreproachable statuses there are whole lives, and relationships that do not have the name they ought to have.
The same mechanism is repeated at higher levels. When it concerns the clergy it causes scandal; when it concerns lay people, it does not. Who knows why. Here in the Vatican it has worked like this for years, and it still works like this: a monsignor or a cardinal receives a request from a friend of a friend, from a grandmother, from a distant relative: to hire the young man in St Peter’s Basilica, in the Apostolic Floreria, in some office perhaps even very close to the Holy Father. Therefore, a very visible role. The handsome young man enters. The superior, who carries within himself an unacknowledged loneliness and does not realise how delicate the position he is in really is, treats him with “special attention”. The young man notices, understands that he is “the favourite”, knows that from there can come the promotion, the pay rise, the advancement. He allows himself to be courted. Then, when the relationship wears down - because one has obtained what he wanted, or the other has shifted his attention elsewhere - blackmail, threats and complaints begin. One is dismissed out of spite, the other is moved as punishment. The bomb explodes.
The same mechanism is repeated with those religious who suffer from their own condition, do not accept it, feel lonely, and end up throwing themselves into the arms of people who boast of titles they do not have, pass themselves off as journalists, and exploit the attention of the religious in order to get a tour of the Sistine Chapel, the Apostolic Palace, the Vatican Gardens. It is the religious, in an extremely delicate position - to the point of being able to become a reason for blackmail even against the Pope himself - who takes the photos, skips from corridor to corridor, and gives these people access to places that should not be accessible. Only then to find the very same people he brought into those exclusive places speaking of him in disparaging terms, with homophobic epithets, in front of anyone.
Faced with these events, some ask themselves: is it really possible that people so fragile are placed in roles so delicate? Unfortunately, yes. And let us not think we are an exception: what happened in the Italian government with the Sangiuliano case shows how the dynamics we find in our communities and in the Vatican are the same ones that appear wherever power and taboos have to be managed together. Beyond, however, the image that must be protected - which is certainly a concern the Pope must have - there is also an attention to fragility that must be the first priority: we must understand why this happens in our environment. We must be concerned for people and help them, often also protecting them from themselves.
The two outcomes: substance abuse and relationship
The possible outlets are essentially two, and we see both in paths of accompaniment. The first is substance abuse, and first of all alcohol, which works as an anaesthetic for loneliness and shame. In Rome, the case is well known of a bishop - moreover a religious, and therefore someone who should have found support and protection in his own institute - who was effectively marginalised and removed from every role, also at the will of the “good and merciful” Secretary of State, partly because he had become a victim of alcohol. The point is exactly this: those who fall into alcohol cannot be left under the porticoes of Piazza Vittorio Emanuele in Rome, at the mercy of youngsters. We must help them. It is the first fraternal duty we have.
A recent clinical case published in Mission in 2025 describes well how, in the clergy, alcohol dependence is grafted onto an underlying conflict of identity, isolation and a sense of spiritual failure, making these patients particularly resistant to standard treatments. The second outcome is the asymmetrical relationship: bonds with people structurally in a subordinate position - parish collaborators, employees, young people placed in services also thanks to the priest’s mediation - often themselves bearers of their own wounds. Here affection, recognition, power and need become confused, in dynamics where each person believes he is giving and in reality is taking. These relationships can last for years and then explode, leaving behind complaints, real suffering, and wounded lives on both sides.
What this reading asks of formation
If addictions are symptoms, the real work is done upstream. It means initial formation that does not bypass the candidate’s humanity but truly faces it, including its uncomfortable points. It means serious psychological accompaniment not only in seminary but throughout priestly life: an accompaniment that is not reduced to rummaging through the priest’s private interests, but supports him in building mature and healthy relationships. Relationships with people who are not already ready to “run to the bishop with a dossier of messages and photos” at the first disagreement, but who are capable of preserving the discretion and fidelity that every real relationship carries with it.
It also means a maturity that makes the priest understand that, even in the absence of a formal code of professional ethics, there are boundaries that cannot be crossed. One does not go on holiday in Trentino with one’s collaborator, with one’s employee, with one’s secretary. Emotional and ministerial maturity is exactly this: the awareness that certain levels must not be mixed. If you are my employee or my collaborator, you are not my friend. And precisely because you are not, our professional relationship can endure. It means permanent formation that includes care for emotional life as an ordinary component, not as an emergency. We cannot continue to form priests capable of speaking about affection and sex only in order to gossip about others, and never in order to speak about themselves, about their own humanity, about their own shadowy areas. In this way, one does not last long, and the facts are proving it.
And it means, above all, a presbyteral culture in which asking for help is not read as failure, but as part of a humanity that continues to mature. That help, however, is something we too must understand: it cannot come from those called to supervise “the application of the law”. Those whose task is oversight should exercise oversight. Those whose task is formation should form. Put directly: if I have a problem with drug dependency, I do not go and ask for help from the police drugs squad. There are other figures, other spaces, other forms of expertise prepared to receive me. The drugs squad does something else, and it is right that it does something else.
Many of us, reading these lines, will recognise ourselves. But when the symptom arrives, it is already the end of a story. The real work is done beforehand.
fr.I.L. and fr.A.D.
Silere non possum