Vatican orders sexuality book pulled out

THE Vatican has censured a book questioning the Catholic Church’s teaching on sexual morality and ordered it removed from bookstores, according to Spanish media.

The book, Sexuality and the homosexual condition in Christian Morality, (Sexualidad y condición homosexual en la moral cristiana) by Spanish Redemptorist priest Marciano Vidal, is published in Spanish by the Society of Saint Paul, a religious order devoted to Catholic publishing and media outreach.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais on February 15 said no detailed explanation was given, but simply that the book contains expressions “contrary to the doctrine of the Church regarding sexuality.”

Previous works by Vidal have already been condemned in a notification of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (SCDF) in 2001 by then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Vidal was censured for claiming that the Catholic Church’s teachings condemning sodomy, masturbation, contraception, sterilization, artificial insemination, and in vitro fertilization were open to doubt, and making ambivalent statements about “therapeutic” abortion.

Although Vidal at the time agreed to revise his works to bring them into conformity with Church teaching, in cooperation with the bishops of Spain, he ultimately decided not to do so.

“It was asked of me that if I would like to do a new edition of the Morality of Attitudes, I would have to enter into a relationship with the Commission for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference,” Vidal later told the Spanish news agency IVICON. “Maintaining that dialog, I have decided not to do a new edition.”

Report from LifeSiteNews.com