Page 5, 30th September 2005

30th September 2005

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Page 5, 30th September 2005 — Pope ‘will ban celibate gay seminarians’, claim reports
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Pope ‘will ban celibate gay seminarians’, claim reports

But other Church sources say the ‘leaks’ are misleading, says Simon Caldwell HOMOSEXUAL MEN could be stopped from entering the Catholic priesthood under a ruling which has been approved by Pope Benedict XVI, it has been claimed.
Alleged leaks from a Vatican “instruction” say that even celibate homosexual men around the world will be barred from the priesthood.
But other sources close to the Vatican say that it is unlikely that the Pontiff will approve such a Draconian measure.
The supposed leaks were first published on the website of Catholic World News (CWN), a conservative news service operating from the Vatican.
They say that gay candidates are unsuitable for ordination because “their condition suggests a personality disorder which detracts from their ability to serve as ministers”.
The claims were supported by an anonymous Vatican official who spoke to the New York Times days after the initial leak. But Fr Richard John Neuhaus, one of America’s most influential Catholic writers, admired by the Pope and President Bush, told the Herald that the New York Times story was misleading.
“My contacts in Rome indicate that the instruction will not contain a blanket ban,” he said.
According to the reports, the document stops short of authorising the expulsion of gay men already ordained as priests but will strongly urge them to renew their dedication to chastity if they have continuing homosexual impulses.
Pope Benedict, 78, approved the content of the document, which has taken 10 years to prepare, at the end of August, the reports claim. One source said the instruction will be to presented to the Synod of Bishops in Rome on October 13.
It is expected to be signed by Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, the Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education, which controls the world’s Catholic seminaries, and by his secretary, Archbishop Michael Miller.
According to supporters of a total ban, the document will not repre sent a change in the Catholic Church’s rules of admission to the priesthood but will be a reformulation of an existing prohibition on gay men becoming priests, which was introduced by Blessed Pope John XXIII in 1961.
It is unclear how the Vatican might propose to screen out gay candidates to the priesthood.
As fears of a “gay witchhunt” mounted in the United States, a number of Vatican observers echoed Fr Neuhaus’s argument that the reports should be treated cautiously until the content of the document was better known.
Writing in the American National Catholic Reporter newspaper, John Allen, a commentator based in Rome, said: “We don’t yet have the document, and as always with Church texts, the devil is in the detail.
“That’s particularly true with this instruction, since the Vatican has already twice published documents indicating that homosexuals should not be admitted to the priesthood (a document from the Congregation for Religious in 1961 and another from the Congregation for Divine Worship in May 2002).
“To what extent the new instruction will mark a change in policy, and what its practical impact may be, therefore remains to be seen.” AVatican source, said to be working on the document, told the Washington-based Catholic News Service (CNS) that a date had not been set for its release, nor had it been signed.
Homosexual Catholics in Britain, however, have already begun to express their anger over the document. “I think it is a completely sad state of affairs,” said Mark Dowd, chairman of Quest, a British-based pastoral support group for Catholic homosexuals and a former seminarian.
“It’s already tough being a homosexual Catholic and this really makes you feel like hanging your boots up.” Dr Timothy Potts, a gay Catholic from Leeds, said the exclusion of gay men from the priesthood would cause a crisis in vocations. “The most reliable estimate we have for the number of gay clergy is about 50 per cent,” he said.
“This document means there is going to be a real dearth of priests. It’s going to be very foolish. They are simply going to make sure that there are even fewer priests. The Church will fade out.” Pope John Paul II commissioned the instruction in 1994, reportedly because he was concerned that the earlier instruction had been ignored, with a rise in the proportion of gay clergy — in English-speaking countries in particular — throughout the 1970s and 1980s as vocations among heterosexual men dropped.
One former US seminary rector, Fr Donald Cozzens, said the priesthood was becoming a “gay profession” in a book published in 2000 called The Changing Face of the Priesthood.
Last year, a Church report blamed gay clergy — rather than paedophile priests — for the sexual abuse scandals that convulsed the US Catholic Church in 2002.
Commissioned by the American Catholic bishops, the 145-page report revealed that 81 per cent of almost 11,000 clerical abuse victims in America were male and that 78 per cent were adolescent boys aged between 11 and 17 years.
The report concluded that the emergence of gay subcultures among the clergy “contributed to an atmosphere in which sexual abuse of adolescent boys by priests was more likely”.
It also expressed concern that such subcultures caused heterosexuals to leave the seminaries or put them off applying to join in the first place.
Earlier this month it was revealed that the Vatican had ordered officials investigating 229 American seminaries in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis to search for “evidence of homosexuality”.
Under the review, seminary staff have been also asked to “watch out for signs of particular friendships” among trainee priests to determine if a gay subculture is flourishing among their students. The overall purpose of the apostolic visitation, according to the working document, was to examine “various elements of priestly formation in the United States”.
But it demands that seminaries explicitly uphold Church’s teaching on contraception, pre-marital sex, homosexuality and abortion.
The review also seeks to identify seminary staff who “dissent from the authoritative teaching of the Church or whose conduct does not provide good example to future priests”.
As early as October 2002 Vatican sources said that the forthcoming document would take the position that homosexual orientation was “objectively disordered” and therefore homosexuals should not be admitted to the seminary or be ordained as priests.
“The document’s position [on admission of homosexuals to the priesthood] is negative, based in part on what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says in its revised edition, that the homosexual orientation is ‘objectively disordered,’” one source told CNS.
“Therefore, independent of any judgment on the homosexual person, a person of this orientation should not be admitted to the seminary and, if it is discovered later, should not be ordained,” he said.
The 1961 document, which said that “those affected by the perverse inclination to homosexuality or pederasty should be excluded from religious vows and ordination”, has never been abrogated, the official added.
The issue also was raised in early March 2002 when Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said that “people with [homosexual] inclinations just cannot be ordained”.
As for objections that screening homosexuals would violate their rights, the CNS sources described the call to the priesthood as a matter of vocation or divine grace, not human rights.
In the Church’s view, no one had a “right” to be ordained, they said.




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