Italian Bishops Approve Gay Men for Priesthood... as Long as They Stay Celibate

The Vatican now says that openly gay men may be ordained and serve as priests on the condition that they – like their heterosexual peers – stay celibate, Sky News reported.

The change was approved by a conference of Italian bishops, and it's still uncertain whether the new approach will be adopted globally.

"The conference's new guidelines for the training of priests didn't recommend that openly gay men shouldn't be barred from the priesthood, but it did heavily hint at it," Euronews detailed, before recalling that Catholic orthodoxy pathologizes same-sex romantic relationships, calling them "intrinsically disordered."

"Although the Vatican had not explicitly prohibited gay men from entering the priesthood in the past," Sky News recalled, "an instruction from 2016 barred men who have 'deep-seated homosexual tendencies.'"

The bishops called for a new approach to the question, with the bishops stating that the question of whether a candidate for the priesthood is gay is not enough in and of itself, but should be considered "within the whole framework of the young person's personality."

The shift stands in contrast to conservative bishops seeking to place blame for the pedophile priest scandal on gay clerics. "Researchers who have studied patterns of clergy sex abuse say they have found no evidence of a link with sexual orientation," NPR noted in a 2018 story on the scandal.

If there is a link between pedophilia and sexual orientation, other research suggests that it is straight people who are far more likely to offend than queer individuals. Reports indicate that pedophiles overwhelmingly self-identify as heterosexual, and scientific research has verified that heterosexual pedophiles outnumber LGBTQ+ ones by 11:1.

Pope Francis has been both praised and criticized for his relatively accepting attitude toward LGBTQ+ members of the church. In one of his more recent comments on the subject, he "told the Associated Press in an interview that 'being homosexual isn't a crime,'" Euronews recalled.

But the pope has also used language deemed to be homophobic. Euronews recounted that Francis said last year that gay men "shouldn't be allowed to enter the priesthood as there was 'frociaggine'" – Italian for "faggotry" – "in some of the seminaries."

Francis apologized for that remark, but, according to reports, repeated it a short time later.

The Italian bishops' guidelines did not change the church's exclusion of women from the priesthood, reports noted.