Word: vaticaners
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...longer appears a question of if, but how the Vatican will try to restrict homosexuals from joining the priesthood. As 256 of the world's bishops gathered in Rome for a three-week synod--the first under Pope Benedict XVI--details filtered out to the Italian press that something a bit less draconian than a blanket ban was in the works. A long-shelved document providing specific admission instructions to seminaries is expected to be issued in November. The "instruction" from the Congregation for Catholic Education would add some teeth to a long-standing but often loosely enforced...
...senior Vatican official told TIME that a more absolute ban on homosexuality would be impossible to enforce. "What does it mean to be gay?" he asks. "You have to acknowledge the complexity of the situation, but you also have to enforce the discipline." The first step, according to this official, is ridding the priesthood of those who proudly acknowledge a gay identity. "It's almost like glorying in the sin," he said. The church says gays should be treated with dignity, but its 1992 update of the catechism calls homosexual acts "intrinsically disordered...
...true to doctrine. Sources close to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger say he was outraged by details of the clergy sex-abuse crisis in the U.S. and elsewhere and the high rate of priests preying on teenage boys. And although there is no correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia, the current Vatican thinks cracking down on the former will help correct the latter...
...past month, screeners like Plante have braced for a new directive from the Vatican. In the wake of the sexual-abuse scandal among U.S. clergy--in which some 80% of the victims were boys--the church seemed poised to carry out a blanket ban on admitting homosexuals, even celibate gays, to its seminaries. Italian newspapers, however, are now reporting that Pope Benedict XVI had signed a somewhat less extreme "instruction." (See accompanying story.) But while awaiting that edict, the psychologists like Plante, who (among other things) help determine whether prospective seminarians are gay, have been drawn into a debate about...
...contention that homosexuality doesn't make one more likely to sexually abuse children. For instance, Father Gerard McGlone, a Jesuit psychologist and a vice president of Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, believes some tightening of the admission process is appropriate: "I think to a certain extent the Vatican is correct in trying to weed out unhealthy expressions of the homosexual experience." But he is also worried that tougher guidelines might backfire by encouraging gay or sexually confused priests to deceive themselves about their own orientation, which could lead to a subsequent crisis and pathology...