Italian Catholic Scouts group to allow LGBTQ+ leaders for first time
The late Pope Francis meets with members of the Association of Italian Catholic Guides and Scouts (AGESCI) in 2015 (Getty Images)
Italy’s Catholic Scouts is set to allow LGBTQ+ Scout leaders to join the group for the first time ever as it updates its outdated selection criteria.
The council for the Italian Association of Catholic Guides and Scouts, also known as AGESCI, announced the change in a document shared on 28 May.
“AGESCI has reached the conclusion that… emotional orientation and gender identity cannot constitute exclusion criteria in the discernment that community leaders are called upon to exercise when an adult requests to join the association to play an educational role,” the document said.
It went on to say that the teaching of being welcoming at the heart of AGESCI means “it is essential to promote paths aimed at overcoming homophobic, lesbophobic and transphobic feelings and attitudes.”
It continued: “Such feelings, in fact, constitute an obstacle to the recognition, inclusion, and integration of male and female leaders in our groups, and at all levels of the association.”
AGESCI was founded in 1974, and is Italy’s largest scouting and guiding association, as well as its largest general youth group. As of 2024, it had 182,000 members and almost 33,500 leaders, around 2,000 of whom were priests.
The decision to accept LGBTQ+ leaders has come following three years of debate within the organisation, according to Wanted in Rome.
LGBTQ+ people have been permitted to participate in AGESCI activities but were banned from serving in educational leadership roles.
During the consultation period, which has been ongoing since 2022, the AGESCI collected testimonies from LGBTQ+ members to learn more about their experiences with exclusion and prejudice within the group’s ranks.
The change comes less than a month after the Vatican has highlighted the “pain” and “profound suffering” experienced by LGBTQ+ Catholics, particularly in the context of conversion therapy, for the first time ever in its 2026 report.
The historic Synod report, which was released on 5 May, included testimonies from two gay Catholic men – one from the United States and one from Portugal – in same-sex marriages who had undergone the so-called ‘conversion therapy’.
As a whole, the report encouraged the inclusion of LGBTQ+ Catholics and concluded that the church’s efforts to “repair” their sexual orientations have contributed to “profound suffering, personal lacerations, and experiences of marginalisation or ‘double lives’ for believers with same-sex attractions.”
The report was celebrated by a number of LGBTQ+ Catholics in positions of authority within the church.
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