Vatican City - Pope Benedict on Thursday appointed a new archbishop to San Francisco, one of the Church's most liberal dioceses dubbed the "gay capital" of the United States.
George Niederauer, 69, formerly archbishop of Salt Lake City, replaces William Levada who was brought to the Vatican by Pope Benedict to head the Congregation of Doctrine of the Faith, the influential position held for 23 years by Joseph Ratzinger before he was elected Pontiff.
Niederauer was recently quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune defending the Vatican's ruling which last month restricted the rights of gays to become priests, but he said that many men with homosexual tendencies became priests.
"In every generation, there have been many celibate priests whose principal attraction might be to their same sex," he was quoted as saying on the newspaper's Web site.
The Vatican ruling says practising homosexuals should be barred from entering the priesthood along with men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies and those who support gay culture.