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  Vatican Document on Gay Priests up in Air

By Nicole Winfield
phillyburbs.com [Vatican City]
August 31, 2005

VATICAN CITY - As the Vatican prepares to visit U.S. seminaries in September in response to the sex abuse scandal, the fate of a long-awaited Vatican document on whether homosexuals should be barred from the priesthood appears uncertain.

One senior Vatican official suggested it might have been shelved, though top American churchmen said they understood it would be coming out soon.

The Vatican press office announced in November 2002, at the height of the sex scandal, that the Congregation for Catholic Education was drawing up guidelines for accepting candidates for the priesthood that would address the question of whether gays should be barred.

The document has been controversial from the start, and there has long been speculation that it may never be released because of its sensitive nature. Some priests have said the document is sorely needed, while others say it will do more harm than good, antagonizing existing homosexual priests and driving others underground.

A senior Vatican official said recent news reports that the document was in the hands of Pope Benedict XVI were "completely wrong" and there was no news on the topic - implying that the document may have been shelved, at least for now.

"There is nothing new," the official said.

The chairman of the U.S. bishops' committee on priestly formation, Bishop John Nienstedt, said he had been told by the Congregation for Catholic Education that the document would be coming out soon, and other American churchmen said they too were expecting it.

"I don't know where the document is," Nienstedt said in a phone interview Wednesday. "My understanding from the congregation was that it would come out soon."

Pope John Paul II called for the seminary visits in 2002 as another response to the sex abuse scandal. Teams of U.S. bishops and seminary personnel chosen by the Vatican will visit all 229 U.S. theology schools, seminaries and other training institutions, interviewing seminarians and faculty members and reviewing, among other things, the schools' admissions criteria.

The teams then will report back to the Congregation for Catholic Education, which will then draft an "overall evaluation" for bishops and superiors of religious orders, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a statement announcing details of the visits.

Vatican congregations have been studying the issue of gay priests for years, but the matter gained renewed attention in the wake of the sex abuse scandal. Most of the victims were adolescent boys.

Experts on sex offenders say there is no credible evidence that homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to abuse children, but several church leaders argue that gay clergy were to blame.