ROME
LifeSite
ROME, September 19, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Homosexual men may not be admitted to the Catholic priesthood, according to a soon-to-be released document that has been approved by Pope Benedict XVI. The document has been anticipated since before the death of Pope John Paul II and speculation has raged that it would retreat for political reasons from declaring a ban on ordaining declared homosexual men.
In a media update today, Catholic World News says that the text was approved by Pope Benedict at the end of August. The document, to be classed as an “Instruction” comes from the Congregation for Catholic Education and says that homosexual men should not be admitted to seminaries even if they are celibate. It says that homosexuality, understood by the Catholic Church as a moral and psychological disorder, seriously “detracts from their ability to serve as ministers.”
The document is expected to be released to the public after the international Bishops synod in Rome in October.
In 2002, the same year the scandal of widespread abuse of minors by homosexual predators in the priesthood, Catholic journalist and author, Michael Rose, released his best-selling exposé of what he identified as a homosexual underground in the seminary system that reached all the way into chanceries. Rose implicated bishops and seminary rectors as well as priests in enormous network whose objective was to make the Catholic priesthood a “gay profession.” The presence of the “lavender mafia” in US seminaries, said Rose in his book, has led to a clerical culture in which the teaching of the Catholic Church on other doctrinal issues, especially on abortion, contraception and marriage, is undermined or ignored.