Vatican may allow celibate gay priests
Vatican City A Vatican document expected to be made public soon stops short of a sweeping ban on gays entering the priesthood, allowing those who have lived chastely for three years to be candidates for the clergy, a senior Vatican official said Friday.
The document, in the works for at least three years, updates Vatican policy, which had held that gays or men with homosexual tendencies should not be ordained, regardless of whether they can remain celibate.
The new document permits candidates who have lived a chaste life for at least three years before their admission to a seminary, said the senior official, who requested anonymity because the document has not yet been released.
The official confirmed a report in leading Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Friday listing the reasons for not admitting gay candidates, which include men who publicly show their homosexuality and those who reveal an attraction to what the document described as the gay lifestyle.
The report, by the newspaper’s chief Vatican correspondent, Luigi Accattoli, cited sources speaking to him about the document from the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education. The Italian weekly Panorama said in its Friday editions that Pope Benedict XVI approved the document during the summer.
Five Serbs charged in taped executions
Belgrade, Serbia-Montenegro Serbia’s war crimes prosecutors filed charges Friday against five Serb paramilitaries who appeared in a video showing the execution of six Srebrenica Muslims.
The five, members of the notorious Scorpions unit, are charged with war crimes against civilians committed on July 17, 1995, near the town of Trnovo, at the foot of Mount Treskavica, about 12 miles south of Sarajevo.
The prisoners were forced into a truck and driven to a hilly roadside, where four of them were lined up with their hands tied and executed. Two remaining prisoners were ordered to carry the bodies to a burnt-out cottage, where they too were executed, the indictment said.
Police: Man had home full of smuggled artifacts
Rome Hundreds of smuggled artifacts were found at the museum-like home of an elderly Austrian tour guide believed to have taken the objects from clandestine excavations near the Italian capital, police said Friday.
The 82-year-old guide, known as “Mozart” in the art trafficking world, was issued a citation because of his advanced age, police said.
Carabinieri police Col. Ferdinando Musella said most of about 600 illegally excavated artifacts dating from between the 8th century B.C. and the 5th century A.D. were found in the home of the guide. “His house was just like a museum, with objects on display and ready to be sold,” Musella said. Some of the artifacts at the home in the Austrian town of Linz even had price tags, authorities said.