Gianni Geraci: “With my partner I experienced marital love” which I tell in “For better or for worse”

Article published in GIORNALE DI LECCO on 25 March 2024, page 17

LECCO. A dialogue on the Christian value of the experience of love in homosexual couples, the relationship between the Catholic Church and queer people, ranging up to the blessing of gay couples and the "fight" against gender ideology.

It was an important, difficult, thorny topic presented last Thursday at the house on the well in Chiuso. Lecco Pride and the Community of Via Gaggio wanted the meeting. The speaker of the evening - presented by Michele Benini - was Gianni Geraci, leader of the group of Milanese homosexual Christians The Ford and author of the booklet downloadable online “In good times and in bad. Christian homosexuals take the gamble of building a relationship forever” (ed. edited by La Tenda di Gionata).

«Experiencing one's homosexuality as adults by integrating it harmoniously into the rest of one's life presupposes a journey of acceptance that is often long and difficult - the beginning -.

And Faith itself, which in the eyes of a superficial observer, seems to represent an obstacle, brings real choices of freedom. Only from an accepted and consciously lived faith can that process of reconciliation with one's own biography originate, which is the basis of any path of conversion."

Gianni Geraci was born in 1959 and lived in Porto Valtravaglia, on Lake Maggiore, until the end of the Seventies. He studied at the Catholic University and graduated in Statistics at the University of Padua in 1989. After having actively participated in the life of some Catholic associations, he came into contact with the Guado group in Milan and, in 1996, was appointed spokesperson for the Coordination of Christian Homosexual Groups in Italy.

«Behind this booklet there is a personal experience – he added -. I started writing it in the first months of 2020, because I was experiencing a very particular situation. I lived with my partner Luigi and we had just discovered that he had colon cancer which had already spread to his liver. An evil that then killed him on August 15, 2021. Tired of hearing, especially within the Church: "But you homosexuals are not capable of building lasting relationships“, I took pen and paper.

It all starts from the fact that John Paul II, in 1989, asked himself whether it was legitimate to recognize the existence of conjugal love in homosexual couples. And the answer was no. But then he made a long speech on the characteristics of that love and I assure you that the relationship that existed between me and Luigi - who died in my arms - had all the characteristics that the Pope indicated.

John Paul I, when he was patriarch of Venice, wrote a letter to Penelope indicating the risks that are run in a marriage: infidelity, boredom, separation... They are the same that are run in any couple relationship, if not properly cultivated, whether heterosexual or homosexual".

What is missing so that homosexual love is not opposed by the church?

«Last autumn the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a document on the blessing. Alongside the formal blessings there are many others that can also be given by lay people, the text speaks of blessings of homosexual couples, of divorced and remarried people, of polygamous people to refer to cultural situations different from ours.

The reactions that occurred only concerned homosexual couples. Yet houses, tanks, dogs and cows are blessed... But not gays. And this means that in the Catholic Church there is a very serious problem with homosexuality, almost an atavistic terror.

The Popes before Francis did not have the courage to address the issue and when they did they mentioned it in the catechism. The most important document on the topic of homosexuality that the church has written is a letter to the bishops dated 1986. And although, in 1990, there was the declaration by the World Health Organization that homosexuality is a minority variant, but normal, of man's sexual behavior, that text is still cited today."

And again: «Finally gay people have begun to live their lives publicly and those who have approached (them) have discovered that these existences are so normal that they seem banal. We are like everyone else, except that we belong to a minority and we live in full solidarity with the people who are included in the acronym LGBTQ+ who are not like us (we can ask ourselves what this has to do with an asexual or an intersexual), but with we have in common the fact of being discriminated against because of our sexual identity."