The president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Georg Baetzing, has said he disagrees with the Vatican’s ban on the ordination of homosexual men to the priesthood.
It led to homosexuality being regarded as taboo and hidden, Baetzing said. A spokesman for Baetzing’s diocese of Limburg confirmed to Germany’s Catholic News Agency (KNA) that the bishop had made those statements which were quoted by the Deutschlandfunk radio station on Wednesday.
Secret homosexuality
The Vatican should depart from this rule, Baetzing said. Asked by the broadcaster whether it was right to exclude someone who came out as gay from the priesthood, but to tolerate secret homosexuality, Baetzing’s spokesman replied: “Generally, it is the case that a candidate’s secret relationships stand in the way of a serious willingness to clarify his professional and life decisions”.
But that applied regardless of whether someone was homosexual or heterosexual. This should not play any role at all in the question of suitability for the priesthood. The decisive factor was that a secret relationship did not fit in with the decision to be ordained as a priest.
The current Vatican guidelines published in December 2016 state that “practising homosexuals” and men who have “deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support a so-called homosexual culture” are excluded from the priesthood.
Excluded
These guidelines confirmed a Vatican document from 2005, even though the Vatican had stressed after initial debates that homosexuals were not generally excluded from the priesthood and that a differentiated case-by-case examination was necessary.
During the Synodal Path reform consultations on the future of the Catholic Church in Germany, Baetzing had repeatedly spoken out in favour of reforms in Catholic sexual morality, including a general reassessment of homosexuality.
The Deutschlandfunk broadcast was about the story of a man who had to leave the seminary because of his homosexuality.
Originally reported by KNA Germany.
