Vatican: Ordination Of Gays ‘Very Risky’

VATICAN
WBZ.com

Dec 5, 2002 3:21 pm US/Eastern
(AP) (VATICAN CITY) The ordination of gay men into the priesthood is “imprudent” and “very risky,” according to a letter written by a top Vatican official.

The claim by Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina Estevez likely will fuel the debate about homosexuals in the priesthood — a perennial issue gaining new attention after the clergy sex abuse scandal in the United States and elsewhere.

Medina Estevez, the recently retired prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, offered his thoughts about gays in the priesthood in a letter published in the congregation’s magazine, Notitiae.

Ordination “of homosexual men or men with homosexual tendencies is absolutely inadvisable and imprudent, and from the pastoral point of view, very risky,” Medina Estevez wrote.