By Cindy Wooden
Vatican City
Catholic News Service The Vatican has been working since 2001 on an instruction against accepting homosexual candidates to the priesthood, but several officials said in late September that Pope Benedict XVI has not approved the document yet, so a date for its publication has not been set. "Obviously, it will come out, but the question is when," one Vatican official told Catholic News Service Sept. 22. A top official at one of the congregations working on the instruction insisted Sept. 22, "It has not been approved. There is nothing new" to report about the document's progress. Since 2001 -- when the Congregation for Catholic Education, which is responsible for setting seminary policies, decided an instruction was needed and began working with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on a draft -- numerous reports have been published claiming it was about to be released. As of late September, no publication date had been announced and no Vatican official was willing to be quoted by name about the document's content. However, Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien, who has been appointed coordinator of the Vatican-mandated study of U.S. seminaries, discussed his views on accepting homosexual seminarians in an early September interview with the National Catholic Register newspaper. "I think anyone who has engaged in homosexual activity, or has strong homosexual inclinations, would be best not to apply to a seminary and not to be accepted into a seminary," said the archbishop, who heads the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services. O'Brien said even homosexuals who have been celibate for 10 or more years should not be admitted to seminaries. He added, "The Holy See should be coming out with a document about this," although he did not say if he knew when the document would be published. O'Brien was at the Vatican Sept. 21-22 with a group of military chaplains and told CNS he did not have further information about the document's publication. As early as October 2002, Vatican sources told CNS the document would take the position that since the church considers the homosexual orientation to be "objectively disordered" homosexuals should not be admitted to the seminary or ordained. "The document's position (on admission of homosexuals to the priesthood) is negative, based in part on what the 'Catechism of the Catholic Church' says in its revised edition, that the homosexual orientation is 'objectively disordered,'" said one source. "Therefore, independent of any judgment on the homosexual person, a person of this orientation should not be admitted to the seminary and, if it is discovered later, should not be ordained," he said. Vatican officials have said the new instruction would be a reformulation of a 1961 document from the then-Sacred Congregation for Religious on the selection of candidates for the priesthood. "Those affected by the perverse inclination to homosexuality or pederasty should be excluded from religious vows and ordination," the 1961 document said. It said the community life and priestly ministry would constitute a "grave danger" or temptation for these people. The document recommended that any person with serious unresolved sexual problems be screened out, saying that the chastity and celibacy required by religious and priestly life would constitute for them a "continuous heroic act and a painful martyrdom." The 1961 document has never been abrogated, so is still technically valid, officials said. The issue also was raised in early March 2002 when Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told The New York Times that "people with (homosexual) inclinations just cannot be ordained." "That does not imply a final judgment on people with homosexuality," he said. "But you cannot be in this field." Church officials, who asked not to be named, said at the time that the Vatican was not trying to impose an arbitrary norm against homosexuals, but was trying to make "prudent decisions" based on individual cases at the seminary level. They noted that the Vatican viewed the issue as mainly dealing with future priests, not those already ordained. As for objections that screening homosexuals would violate their rights, the sources said the call to the priesthood was a matter of vocation or divine grace, not human rights. In the church's view, no one has a "right" to be ordained, they said. Some church officials have questioned whether some ordinations might even be considered invalid because of homosexuality. But the sources said that is not how the Vatican plans to approach the issue. For one thing, the validity of orders is a thorny church law question that would in turn raise pastoral problems -- such as the legitimacy of past sacramental acts carried out by a priest whose ordination was judged invalid. In a 2001 interview with CNS, then-Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, who was secretary of the Vatican's doctrinal congregation, explained why church leaders view homosexual orientation as a potential problem in a seminarian. Bertone, now a cardinal and archbishop of Bologna, Italy, said that while the homosexual inclination is not sinful in itself it "evokes moral concern" because it is a strong temptation to actions that "are always in themselves evil." He defined the homosexual inclination as "a temptation that, for whatever reason, has become so predominant in a person's life as to become a force shaping the entire outlook of the person." "Persons with a homosexual inclination should not be admitted to the seminary," Bertone said. September 22, 2005, National Catholic Reporter | 
