Vatican reaffirms its ban on gay priests

PEOPLE who have “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” or who “support the so-called ‘gay culture’” cannot be priests in the Catholic Church, the Vatican said in a new document on the priesthood.

The document said that the church’s policy on gay priests has not changed since the last Vatican pronouncement on the subject in 2005.

Some have been hoping for more openness towards gay priests ever since Pope Francis uttered perhaps the most famous sentence of his papacy – when he was asked in 2013 about the subject of priests who are gay – “Who am I to judge?”

But the church’s Congregation for the Clergy, in a document approved by Francis, declared that bishops and clergy who oversee seminaries should indeed judge candidates’ sexuality, and should ban them from becoming priests on that basis.

The document, called “The Gift of the Priestly Vocation,” has an official publication date of December 8 but was posted online earlier.

It covers many aspects of the priesthood, only touching on the subject of sexuality towards the end.

It quotes from the 2005 document on the subject of gay priests: “The church… cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practise homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture’. Such persons, in fact, find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women…” Washington Post