Italy’s Catholic Scouts are set to allow LGBTQ+ Scout leaders to join the organisation for the first time, following an update to its long-standing selection criteria.
The council for the Italian Association of Catholic Guides and Scouts, 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.
The organisation also said its commitment to welcome means “it is essential to promote paths aimed at overcoming homophobic, lesbophobic and transphobic feelings and attitudes.”
“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,” it continued.
Founded in 1974, AGESCI is Italy’s largest scouting and guiding association, as well as the country’s largest general youth organisation. As of 2024, it had 182,000 members and almost 33,500 leaders, including around 2,000 priests.
According to Wanted in Rome, the decision to accept LGBTQ+ leaders follows three years of internal debate.
While LGBTQ+ people were already allowed to take part in AGESCI activities, they had previously been barred from serving in educational leadership roles.
During the consultation process, which has been underway since 2022, AGESCI gathered testimonies from LGBTQ+ members in order to better understand their experiences of exclusion and prejudice within the organisation.
The move comes less than a month after the Vatican acknowledged, for the first time in its 2026 report, the “pain” and “profound suffering” experienced by LGBTQ+ Catholics, particularly in relation to conversion therapy.
The historic Synod report, released on 5 May, included testimony from two gay Catholic men in same-sex marriages, one from the United States and one from Portugal, who had undergone so-called conversion therapy.
More broadly, the report encouraged greater inclusion of LGBTQ+ Catholics and concluded that church-backed efforts to “repair” people’s sexual orientations had contributed to “profound suffering, personal lacerations, and experiences of marginalisation or ‘double lives’ for believers with same-sex attractions.”
The report was welcomed by a number of LGBTQ+ Catholics in positions of authority within the church.
For AGESCI, the decision marks a significant shift in how one of Italy’s biggest Catholic youth organisations approaches LGBTQ+ inclusion, opening the door for queer members to serve openly in leadership roles for the first time.
