Gay Chef Will Open Restaurant at Castel Gandolfo; and More News

Here are a few items that may be of interest:

Art Smith

1.  Celebrity chef Art Smith, who is openly gay and married to a man, will be one of two managers to oversee a new restaurant the Vatican is establishing at Castel Gandolfo, the papal retreat outside of Rome.  Smith will join with restaurateur Phil Stefani to establish the new eating desting at Borgo Laudato Sí, within the walls of the Castel Gandolfo villa.  The new restaurant will open in 2026, reports Gay.it.

2.  The head of the Archdiocese of Kisumu, Kenya, told the nation’s vocation directors to ensure that young people considering priesthood or religious life have a “correct understanding of human sexuality,” reported ACIAfica.org. Archbishop Maurice Muhatia Makumba referenced LGBTQ+ issues when he said that “We should not allow a pagan understanding of human sexuality to infiltrate the sacred priesthood and the holy vocation of brotherhood and sisterhood. The more we keep quiet about this thing, the more the church continues to suffer.” He also said that the correct sexuality in religious vocations and marriage is “men with manly feelings” and “women with womanly feelings.”

3.  An obituary for a Georgetown University English and American Studies professor is a reminder of the great gift that LGBTQ+ people can be to Catholic institutions.  The Hoya memorialized Ricardo Ortiz, who taught at the Washington D.C. school for 27 years, as not only a great scholar and teacher, but a staunch advocate for human rights on and off campus. Ortiz’ fiance, Paul O’Neill, was quoted as saying: “He was also especially attentive to those kids who didn’t come into the classroom with an advantage — kids who were immigrants, kids of color and kids who were queer — and he wanted to make sure that their experience in his classroom was an equalizing experience.”

4.  Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the archbishop of Colombo, Sri Lanka, criticized the nation’s tourism agency for seeking to promote the nation’s tourist opportunities to LGBTQ+ markets.  Out in Perth reported that such tourism would adversely affect children and would end up “normalising” homosexuality.  The cardinal stated, “We cannot allow our healthy children to become victims of those with homosexual needs.” While homosexual acts are still criminalized in Sri Lanka, transgender people enjoy a fair of amount of legal options for identifying their gender.

5.  Catholic transgender writer Maxwell Kuzma wrote an excellent reflection on the mass-shooting at Annunication School, Minneapolis at the end of August.  Kuzma’s essay in The National Catholic Reporter focuses on the anti-transgender rhetoric the incident has sparked, noting: “Trans identities have become a scapegoat in the public conversation on mass shootings, when the reality is that white people radicalized by extremist pipelines, and their easy access to guns, are a much more obvious denominator. We have seen the rise of these (mostly male) shooters, young white men radicalized online, and yet their violence has not been leveraged to smear the identity of their entire demographic.”

—Francis DeBernardo, New Ways Ministry, October 25, 2025