Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

Vatican official says he was posing as gay for research

The high-ranking official was suspended after his advances were videotaped.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published October 15, 2007

VATICAN CITY - A Vatican official suspended after being caught on hidden camera making advances to a young man says he is not gay and was only pretending to be gay as part of his work.

In an interview published Sunday, Monsignor Tommaso Stenico told La Repubblica daily he frequented online gay chat rooms and met with gay men as part of his work as a psychoanalyst. He said that he pretended to be gay in order to gather information about "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity."

Vatican teaching holds that gays and lesbians should be treated with compassion and dignity but that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered."

The Vatican said Saturday it was suspending Stenico after he was secretly filmed making advances to a young man and asserting that gay sex was not sinful during a television program on gay priests broadcast Oct. 1 on La7, a private Italian television network.

The Stenico case is unusual among homosexuality cases in the Roman Catholic priesthood because he is a relatively high-ranking Vatican official. He heads an office in the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy - the main office overseeing all the world's priests.

The case comes at a particularly sensitive time, just two years after the Vatican issued tough new guidelines effectively barring gays from the priesthood - seen in large part as a response to complaints about a "gay subculture" in U.S. seminaries.

In the Repubblica interview, Stenico said he had never been gay and was heterosexual but remained faithful to his vow of celibacy. He said he expected to be fully exonerated after a review.

Calls placed to Stenico's home and office went unanswered Sunday.

[Last modified October 14, 2007, 23:39:10]