The Vatican reaffirms its position suggesting gay men should not be priests
by Julie Zauzmer, Washington Post:
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 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 toward 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 Dec. 8 but was posted online earlier. It covers many aspects of the priesthood, only touching on the subject of sexuality on a few pages toward the end of the lengthy report.
It quotes from the 2005 document on the subject of gay priests:
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