A new edict from the Vatican makes it clear that homosexuals are not welcome to join the Roman Catholic priesthood, but the document from Pope Benedict XVI seems studiously nuanced – it makes a distinction between homosexual acts and personal tendencies – leaving room in the priesthood for gay men who maintain celibacy.
The document to be officially unveiled next week is a response to the church’s ongoing sex abuse scandal, in which hundreds of men have claimed they were molested by priests when they were boys.
The document released by the Catholic news agency in Italy is loaded with questionable assumptions – for example, its consideration of homosexuality as a “transitory problem” to be overcome with abstention. It sets an arbitrary three years from the time “adolescent” acts may have occurred to the time when it’s OK to become a priest.
The rules implicitly blame the sex scandals on gay priests, overlooking any heterosexual abuses and cover-ups condoned by church leaders, saying, “One cannot ignore the negative consequences that can stem from the ordination of people with deeply rooted homosexual tendencies.”
The edict seems to take a step toward rooting homosexuals from the priesthood, but not quite. It says nothing about men already in the priesthood who are gay, yet has the effect of driving gay priests further underground by declaring that spiritual directors and confessors “have the duty to dissuade” candidates to the priesthood from pursuing ordination.
The Rev. Fred Daley, a gay priest at St. Francis DeSales Church in Utica, N.Y., was quoted as saying he is afraid the church’s attempt to deal with homosexual priests will “put that whole area back in the closet and will keep folks from being able to work those issues out in the seminary.”
Msgr. Steve Rohlff, rector of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Maryland, says the document merely follows the church’s longstanding teachings on human sexuality, namely that homosexuality is a disorder. “Does that mean that somebody is wicked or evil? No,” Rohlff said. “It means they have a psychosexual disorder.”
Estimates of gay men in U.S. seminaries vary widely, from 10 percent to 60 percent. The ambiguities in the new edict may help church leaders steer some of the seminarians through to ordination, but the rules will likely worsen the shortage of Catholic priests that is another of the Vatican’s major headaches.
