Vatican responds to claims that Cardinal Newman was a homosexual

Basically-accurately reported by the UK Mail:

The Vatican has hit back at claims that the man likely to become Britain’ s next saint was a closet homosexual.

The Holy See is furious at allegations made by gay activists in the UK that Cardinal John Henry Newman was a celibate gay man.

The claims were made after the Government granted a licence for the cardinal to be exhumed from a grave he shares with fellow priest Father Ambrose St John in a small cemetery in Rednal, Worcestershire.

... [Pope Benedict] personally commissioned the Rev Dr Ian Ker, a theologian at Oxford University and the world’s leading Newman scholar, to refute the allegations in an article for the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.

Father Ker, the author of the definitive biography of Newman, said there was no evidence to suggest that the cardinal was gay other than the deep grief at the death of his closest friend and the request to be buried in the same grave as him.

More from CNA.