Pope Francis has said gay people should not be judged or marginalised.

Speaking to reporters on a flight back from Brazil, he said: "If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?"

Commenting to the issue of women priests, he said the Church had spoken and had said "no", but the role of women should not be restricted.

"We cannot limit the role of women in the Church to altar girls or the president of a charity, there must be more," he told Vatican journalists, according to the BBC.

The pope said gay people should be fully accepted in society, even though the Catholic teaching was that homosexual acts were “sinful.”

"The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this very well," Pope Francis said, as cited by the BBC.

"It says they should not be marginalised because of this but that they must be integrated into society."

But he condemned what he described as lobbying by gay people.

"The problem is not having this orientation," he said. "We must be brothers. The problem is lobbying by this orientation, or lobbies of greedy people, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies, so many lobbies. This is the worse problem."

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