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Statement by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor regarding the ‘Instruction’ on homosexuality and seminary admissions released by the Vatican today [Tuesday 29 November 2005]

 The Congregation for Education’s Instruction contains guidance for bishops and others concerned with the selection of candidates to the priesthood, in order to help them to interpret and implement the law of the Church. The Church’s law is clear that bishops should admit to seminaries “only those who are judged qualified to dedicate themselves permanently to the sacred ministries” and must “consider their human moral, spiritual and intellectual qualities, their physical and psychic health and their correct intention” (Canon 241, 1). The Instruction contains guidance specifically on the question of whether to admit to the seminary and holy orders “candidates who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies”.   A priest is primarily a witness to Jesus Christ; anything that detracts from this impedes that witness.

 In recent years human development and affective maturity have become increasingly prominent in the selection and formation of candidates. Priests are required to live lives of celibate chastity, whatever their sexual orientation, and must be able to relate freely and well to both men and women. Bishops must ensure that men are not admitted to the priesthood for whom its requirements and demands will be too burdensome or impossible to fulfil.

 The Instruction is not saying than men of homosexual orientation are not welcome in the priesthood. But it is making clear that they must be capable of affective maturity, have a capacity for celibacy and not share the values of the eroticised gay culture. This is especially important because seminaries are all-male environments.

 As the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales makes clear in its 2004 document Cherishing Life, “a homosexual orientation must never be considered sinful or evil in itself”. Nor should anyone ever suffer discrimination or prejudice as result of such orientation. The Church utterly condemns all forms of unjust discrimination, harassment or abuse directed against people who have homosexual tendencies.
 

Vatican flight from reality
By Michael B. Kelly
The Age, Melbourne, Australia

“This is just the latest stage in the Vatican's campaign to halt the progress of civil and spiritual liberation for gay people. This campaign has revealed an ugly side of the Catholic Church — a side that rejects modern science and psychology, forbids dialogue, and uses power as a blunt instrument of control. This latest sally in the campaign, however, is likely to backfire.”                                (more)
 

Ambiguous
Tendencies

By Robert Mickens
TheTablet

JUST 60 SECONDS after the Vatican released its document on norms for the admission of homosexuals to seminaries to journalists on Tuesday, Bishop William Skylstad, the president of the United States bishops’ conference, released a two-page comment. Shortly afterwards his counterpart in England and Wales – Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor – also issued a statement. The bishops of Switzerland had already released a brief on the text after a leaked version appeared last week on the Adista news agency website. All the comments were nuanced and what many would call sensible interpretations of the new norms. They seemed to interpret the text as meaning that homosexual men could be admitted to seminary as long as they were chastely celibate, had attained “sexual maturity”, were not participating in the “so-called gay culture”, and did not make their sexual orientation the main focus of their lives.

Here in Italy and in the Vatican there has been a very different response. No Roman Curia office or official has been willing to speak on the record about the relatively small document. The Italian bishops’ conference was in no rush to join in the current discussion ahead of its own document on the subject to be published “soon”. The Italian media exhibited an unusual nonchalance towards the issue; even people deeply involved in the Church seemed to just shrug their shoulders. But between these two responses – attentiveness to deciphering the document’s true intent and an apparent total lack of interest – there were two Vatican comments on the Instruction; one was a Secretariat of State-approved article in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, by a French priest-psychoanalyst, and the other was a Vatican Radio interview with the cardinal whose office issued the document. They are likely to be used as the official key to unlocking the true meaning and intention of the text.                            (More)