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Nov. 30, 2005

Vatican rules out ordination for homosexuals

by Luigi Sandri
Ecumenical News International

ROME — A long-awaited Vatican statement says that persons with “deep seated homosexual tendencies” should not under any circumstances become priests.

     “The Church cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders these persons,” states the document published on Nov. 29 and signed by Polish Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education which is responsible for seminaries.

     Plans for the document have been the subject of much media speculation in recent months.

     The 7-page document approved by Pope Benedict XVI says that homosexual acts are “grave sins” for the Roman Catholic Church. “The Tradition has constantly considered them as intrinsically immoral and contrary to the natural law. Consequently, under no circumstance can they be approved,” it notes. “Deep-seated homosexual tendencies, which are found in a number of men and women, are also objectively disordered,” it states.

     Still, the document makes an exception for candidates with “homosexual tendencies that were only the expression of a transitory problem.” However, “such tendencies must be clearly overcome at least three years before ordination to the deaconate,” a step towards ordination as a priest.

     It says that homosexuals “find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women” and that “the candidate to the ordained ministry must reach affective maturity. Such maturity will allow him to relate correctly to both men and women.”

     But a statement in the document rejecting “every sign of unjust discrimination” against homosexuals drew criticism from an Italian Christian gay association and the reform movement, “We are Church.” They accused the Vatican of “hypocrisy.”

     They said in a joint statement, “What is completely mistaken is the idea of there being an incompatibility between affective maturity and a homosexual orientation. The thousands of untroubled homosexuals who we know, and the thousands of homosexual priests who do not live in chastity, confirm the narrow minded way in which the Vatican sees the problem.”

     In a departure from usual practice the document was sent directly to journalists without it being presented at a media conference.

     The Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, was quoted in October saying that being gay should not prevent a man becoming a Catholic priest. “You don’t write off a candidate for the priesthood simply because he is a gay man,” Martin was reported saying by the British Catholic magazine, The Tablet.

     The issue of gay clergy has been the subject of renewed attention after a recent church sex-abuse scandal in the United States. Most abuse victims were reportedly adolescent boys.

     But, said Martin, “you cannot identify homosexuality with pedophilia.” He said that pedophilia is “not the result of homosexuality, nor is it a result of celibacy.”