Anti-gay Catholic cardinal Raymond Burke has claimed that parents should keep their children away from gay relatives.

Cardinal Raymond Burke – who heads the influential Apostolic Signatura within the church – was previously the Archbishop of St Louis.

He said: “If homosexual relations are intrinsically disordered, which indeed they are as reason teaches us and also our faith, then what would it mean to grandchildren to have present at a family gathering a family member who is living [in] a disordered relationship with another person?

“If it were another kind of relationship, something that was profoundly disordered and harmful, we wouldn’t expose our children to that relationship… and neither should we do it in the context of a family member who not only suffers from same-sex attraction, but who has chosen to live out that attraction, to act upon it, committing acts which are always and everywhere wrong, evil.”

Cardinal Burke is one of the most homophobic figures in the modern Catholic Church, and has previously claimed: “[Homophobia is] simply announcing the truth, helping people to discriminate right from wrong in terms of their own activities.”

He was removed from the Vatican Committee last year in favour of the less outspoken Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, but continues to have a senior role within the Church.

He was rumoured last month to be facing demotion to an entirely ceremonial post, but after objection from right wing groups, no such demotion has materialised.

Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio claimed this week that the Church would “never” change its policy on same-sex couples, saying: “To bless this type of union… to say that they are like [heterosexual] marriages, never.”

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