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Italian bishop refutes claim of policy change allowing ordination of gay men: 'Not a correct reading'

Pope Francis gestures as he celebrates New Year's Day during a Mass on World Day of Peace in Saint-Peter's Basilica at the Vatican on Jan. 1, 2025.
Pope Francis gestures as he celebrates New Year's Day during a Mass on World Day of Peace in Saint-Peter's Basilica at the Vatican on Jan. 1, 2025. | ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP via Getty Images

An Italian bishop has insisted that the rules for admission to the priesthood in his home country haven't changed amid reports that new guidelines allow homosexuals to become priests as long as they remain celibate. 

Last Thursday, a document titled “The Formation of priests in churches in Italy. Guidelines and standards for seminaries” took effect. The Italian Episcopal Conference, the group of Roman Catholic bishops in Italy, approved the document at its 78th General Conference in 2023. 

The document generated headlines for its remarks about candidates for the priesthood who struggle with same-sex attraction. It included a word-for-word reiteration of a 2005 Vatican publication titled “Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders.”

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“In relation to people with homosexual tendencies who approach the Seminaries, or who discover this situation during training, in line with their own Magisterium, the Church, while deeply respecting the people in question, cannot admit to the Seminary and to Holy Orders those who practice homosexuality, present deeply rooted homosexual tendencies or support the so-called gay culture,” the Vatican stated at the time. 

However, the guidelines that took effect last week also included a passage asserting: “In the training process, when one does reference homosexual tendencies, it is also appropriate not to reduce discernment only to this aspect, but, as for every candidate to grasp its meaning of the global framework of the young person’s personality, so that, knowing himself and integrating the objectives of his human and priestly vocation, he reaches a general harmony.” 

The document also suggests that all candidates have the responsibility to “welcome chastity as a gift, to freely choose it and live it responsibly in celibacy.” While the latter part of the language in the guidelines gives the impression that individuals with same-sex attraction can become priests in Italy and that Catholic Church teaching on the matter has changed, one Italian bishop is maintaining that this is not the case. 

In a statement to the Italian Episcopal Conference’s newspaper Avvenire, Bishop Stefano Manetti of the Diocese of Fiesole described such a characterization as “not a correct reading.” Manetti stressed that “the paragraph reiterates the norms of the magisterium from the beginning,” referring to the Vatican teaching restated at the beginning of the relevant paragraph. 

“We intend to put the person first,” he added. He summarized the goal of the new language in the document as “helping candidates for the priesthood to gain clarity within themselves,” seeking to provide “an accompaniment to self-knowledge that is often lacking in the young generations and that does not exclude even the boys who arrive in the Seminaries.” 

Manetti defined the meaning of the language in the document as “putting the person at the center beyond immediate categorizations to be able to accompany him in making truth about his sexual orientation.”

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

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