Vatican issues screening
guidelines for priests

VATICAN CITY (AP) - The Vatican has issued new psychological screening guidelines for seminarians - the latest effort by the Roman Catholic Church to be more selective about its priesthood candidates following a series of sex abuse scandals.

The church said it recently issued the guidelines to help church leaders weed out candidates with “psychopathic disturbances.” The scandals have rocked the church in recent years, triggering lawsuits that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements.

The guidelines “became ever more urgent because of the sexual scandals,” Monsignor Jean-Louis Brugues told reporters. He stressed, however, that psychological testing was used in some seminaries as far back as the 1960s - or at least a decade before the sexual abuse scandals exploded in public.

“In all too many cases, psychological defects, sometimes of a pathological kind, reveal themselves only after ordination to the priesthood,” the guidelines said. “Detecting defects earlier would help avoid many tragic experiences.”

The guidelines said problems like “confused or not yet well-defined” sexual identities need to be addressed.

The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests said the Vatican needs to go beyond screening seminarians to end what the group calls the church’s “virtually unchanged culture of secrecy and unchecked power in the hierarchy” that left dangerous priests in parishes.

Vatican officials conducted an evaluation of U.S. Roman Catholic seminaries in response to the abuse crisis to look for anything that contributed to the scandal. The evaluation was completed in July 2006, but the results have not been made public.

The bishops and seminary staff who conducted the onsite reviews gave special attention to what seminarians are taught about chastity and celibacy. The Vatican also directed the evaluators to look for “evidence of homosexuality” in the schools.

Studies commissioned by the bishops’ conference found that the majority of known victims of abuse by priests in the last 50 years were adolescent boys. In response, some Catholics have blamed gay clergy for the scandal; experts on sex offenders contend homosexuals are no more likely than heterosexuals to molest children.

“If the church wants to rule out or screen out people who are risk for hurting people, they should be worried about how someone acts on their sexual orientation,” said Thomas Plante, a Santa Clara University psychology professor who conducts screenings of prospective Catholic priests. “Whether it’s heterosexual or homosexual, it doesn’t matter.”

Queen’s gay marriage
comments ignite flap in Spain

MADRID, SPAIN (AP) - A journalist has defended the accuracy of his book that quotes Queen Sofia criticizing gay marriage. The book has irked the royal palace.

Spain’s king and queen are largely respected as figurehead representatives of the state, and rarely speak out on political or social issues.

Veteran journalist Pilar Urbano released the book, La Reina muy de cerca, or The Queen, very close up, recently to mark the queen’s 70th birthday. The journalist said it was based on 15 interviews with Queen Sofia, and that the Royal Palace approved the book’s galley proofs before it was published, according to news agency Efe.

“What the queen said is what my book says,” Urbano said.

The Royal Palace has challenged the comments attributed to the monarch, however, saying in a statement they “do not correspond exactly” with what she said. The palace also said the book also fails to reflect the queen’s traditional neutrality on public affairs or respect for people who suffer discrimination, such as homosexuals.

“I do not answer to the queen or king, or the Royal Palace. I answer to the truth,” Urbano told Efe.

In the book, the queen is quoted as addressing a wide range of issues and saying she opposes abortion and euthanasia. Spain allows the former under restricted circumstances, and outlaws the latter. But the queen’s alleged remarks on same-sex marriage are the main source of friction and have angered gay rights groups.

Spain legalized gay marriage in 2005, becoming one of the few countries in the world to recognize same-sex couples as having the same rights as heterosexual ones, including the right to adopt children.

“If those persons want to live together, dress up as bride and groom and get married, they can do so, but that should not be called marriage because it is not,” the queen is quoted as saying in Urbano’s book.

Conservative newspaper El Mundo said the queen erred by breaking with her tradition of quiet neutrality.

“As human as this burst of royal sincerity might be, certainly there were better ways to make Queen Sofia’s birthday a new tool for bringing society closer to the throne,” it said in an editorial.