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New Archbishop opposes gay adoption
Archbishop Vincent Nichols
An opponent of gay adoption has been named the new Archbishop of Westminster.
Vincent Nichols, the 63-year-old current Archbishop of Birmingham, is to take over as the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, upon the retirement next month of the current incumbent, Archbishop Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.
Archbishop Nichols recently sought unsuccessfully for Catholic adoption agencies to be exempted from a legal requirement to consider gay couples as prospective parents.
He has also described the sexual orientation laws, which were introduced in 2007 to protect LGBT rights, as contradictory to the Catholic Church’s moral values.
In 2006 he gave evidence to a Parliamentary education committee and stated that specific policies to tackle homophobic bullying in schools were not needed.
Archbishop Nichols told the MPs that “If you begin to pick out particular sections then the list of special policies is going to get very long and there probably would not be too much room on the walls to accommodate it.”
Archbishop Nichols, who was born in Liverpool, is seen a strong defender of traditional Catholic values.
