WORLD: You've argued, against today's conventional wisdom, that the idea of "sexual orientation" is a fiction. What's the scientific evidence?

JS: A nationwide University of Chicago study of sexuality in America in 1994 concluded, ". . . it is patently false that homosexuality is a uniform attribute across individuals, that it is stable over time, and that it can be easily measured." Studies across the globe that have now sampled over 100,000 individuals have found the same.

Which is pretty remarkable when you think that Cuddesdon now only trains about one tenth of those in residential training and less than one twentieth of all those in training in any form.
By way of comparison the six evangelical colleges combined trained the same number of Bishops (15/44). Yet these colleges now account for two-thirds of all those in residential training.

The document is timely, coming as it does amid the rise of the religious Right, in particular in the US.

Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin's theory of evolution in schools, believing "intelligent design" to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began.

2. Naturally, an exhaustive treatment of this complex issue cannot be attempted here, but we will focus our reflection within the distinctive context of the Catholic moral perspective. It is a perspective which finds support in the more secure findings of the natural sciences, which have their own legitimate and proper methodology and field of inquiry.