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“The Church has always considered homosexuality a loss of identity and a deviation, while it has emphasized the need for emotional and sexual maturity on the part of candidates to the priesthood”, said Cardinal Audrys Backis, archbishop of Vilnius, commenting in recent days on the Vatican instruction on the criteria of vocational discernment of persons with homosexual tendencies, with a view to their admission to seminaries and holy orders. In an interview with the ELTA press agency, the cardinal said he had “always maintained a strict attitude on the matter in the seminary of Vilnius”, and called “the assistance of professional psychologists very useful for the vocational discernment of candidates to the seminary”. Cardinal Backis also expressed his deep concern “about the problem of the homosexual tendencies of clergy throughout the world, Lithuania included. No justification he said can diminish the responsibility of those who practice homosexuality” but, at the same time, he warned “of the dangerous errors of those who make public and unfounded accusations that are an affront to human dignity”. Commenting on the same Vatican document, the newly elected president of the Conference of Lithuanian Bishops, Archbishop Sigitas Tamkevicius, declared: “The Catholic Church in Lithuania will always defend the family and behaviour that conforms to human nature; it judges in a negative way any form of gay exhibition or parade and does not approve of homosexual pressure groups “within the structures of the European Union”.
