Vatican

The Vatican insisted Saturday that Pope Benedict XVI had done nothing wrong when, earlier in his career, he hesitated to defrock a California priest who had admitted to molesting two boys. A Vatican lawyer said that it was the local bishop, John Cummins of Oakland, who bore primary responsibility for protecting children from the abusive priest, Stephen Kiesle, and that the pope, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had acted appropriately when he declined to take immediate action.

More than 400 American Roman Catholic theologians charged this week that the Vatican has been throttling church reforms and imposing "an excessive Roman centralization." The theologians contended that the Vatican has undercut a greater role for women, violated rights of theologians, slowed the ecumenical drive for Christian unity and undermined the collegial functioning of national conferences of bishops.

Countries that forcibly repatriate refugees violate their human rights, and Roman Catholics indifferent to their suffering commit sin, the Vatican said Friday. It appealed for international solidarity on behalf of more than 30 million castoff people around the world. "The tragedy of groups and even of entire peoples forced to go into exile is felt today as a constant attack on essential human rights.

Re "Vatican Issues Guidelines on Gay Priests," Nov. 30 It's unfortunate that the Vatican feels the need to scapegoat gay priests for its failure to protect children from sexual predators. Sadly, this misguided policy will only exacerbate the cause of the problem. Gay priests are not the child molesters. A gay person is someone who accepts the goodness and wholeness of consenting, adult same-sex attraction -- regardless of whether one is celibate or not. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church continues to create an atmosphere in the priesthood of such enormous and unrivaled sexual oppression that those prone to predatory sexual abuse of minors will either intensify their efforts or emotionally implode.

The Roman Catholic church has no plans to let women be ordained as deacons, the step below priesthood that allows men to preach at Mass and to help celebrate liturgical services, Vatican officials said Tuesday. Cardinal Pio Laghi, who heads the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, said the ban on female deacons boiled down to one reason: "Christ was a man." Ordination of men as deacons is widely done in the United States, which has 12,000 of the 22,000 deacons worldwide.

A Southern Baptist official has asked President-elect Bill Clinton to revoke a policy instituted by former President Ronald Reagan of appointing a U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. The Rev. Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist social concerns agency, urged Clinton to "strike a blow" for keeping church and state separate by "redressing the wrong done" by Reagan in 1984. "The Holy See of the Roman Catholic Church is an ecclesiastical entity, not a civil state," he said in a letter.

The Vatican has notified the city's diocese that plans to radically renovate a cathedral would violate church law. A letter from Cardinal Jorge Medina outlines why the renovations to the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist would violate liturgical norms, said Jerry Topczewski, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The proposed renovations include moving the altar toward the middle of the sanctuary and replacing pews with movable chairs and kneelers.

In a strongly worded document that defines the moral standards of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican has condemned artificial insemination, embryo and sperm banks, surrogate parenthood and the technology that produces "test-tube babies." The paper, released today, also calls on governments to outlaw all such procedures as well as abortion.

The Roman Catholic Church updated its Universal Catechism on Tuesday with a tougher stand against capital punishment, saying that circumstances justifying its use are "very rare, if not practically nonexistent." Although that near-categorical Vatican position is more than 2 years old, death penalty foes said its inclusion in the popular compendium of Catholic instruction is certain to figure in the debate over capital punishment in the U.S.