VATICAN CITY
Washington Post
By NICOLE WINFIELD
The Associated Press
Thursday, September 22, 2005; 7:01 AM
VATICAN CITY -- A Vatican document will be released in the coming weeks that reaffirms the Catholic Church's belief that homosexuals shouldn't be ordained priests, a Vatican official said Thursday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the document has not been released, said the "instruction" from the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education would contain "some new things and some old things" and would be released well before the end of the year.
That timeframe means the document will be released just as a Vatican-mandated evaluation of all U.S. seminaries, ordered in the wake of the U.S. clergy sex abuse scandal, gets under way.
Several Vatican documents and letters over the years have said gays or men with homosexual tendencies should not be ordained, regardless of whether they can remain celibate.
A Feb. 2, 1961, Vatican document, "Instruction on the Careful Selection and Training of Candidates for the States of Perfection and Sacred Orders," made clear homosexuals should be barred from the priesthood.