No to gay priests - Vatican
2002-12-05 18:00
Nicole Winfield
Vatican City - Gays are not suitable for the priesthood, and their ordination is inadvisable, imprudent and downright risky, a top Vatican official has said.
The claim is likely to fuel debate about homosexuals in the priesthood - an old issue that has received new attention following the clergy sex abuse scandal in the United States.
Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina Estevez, the recently retired prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, offered his advice on what to do about gays in the priesthood in a letter published in the congregation's magazine, Notitiae.
Ordination "of homosexual men or men with homosexual tendencies is absolutely inadvisable and imprudent, and from the pastoral point of view, very risky," Medina Estevez wrote.
"A homosexual person or someone with homosexual tendencies is not, therefore, suitable to receive the sacrament of holy orders," he said in the letter to an unnamed cleric dated May 16 and published in the magazine's November-December editions.
The letter comes as the Vatican is drafting new guidelines for accepting candidates for the priesthood that is expected to address whether gays should be barred.
That document - being prepared by another Vatican office, the Congregation for Catholic Education - isn't expected to be released before next year.
The issue of gays in the priesthood has gained attention following waves of accusations in the United States that priests molested children, and that Church leaders tried to cover up wrongdoing by moving known abusers from parish to parish.
Most of the victims have been adolescent boys. Experts on sex offenders say there is no credible evidence that homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to abuse children, but several church leaders have argued that gay clergy are to blame for the scandal.
News reports in Italy and the United States in recent weeks have said that according to initial drafts of the new guidelines, the Vatican had determined that seminaries should bar men with homosexual tendencies. - Sapa-AP
- SAPA