Ask the archbishop of Dublin to describe the theological weight of the Vatican's latest statement on whether gay men have a place in the priesthood. He'll say it didn't amount to much.
In Archbishop Diarmuid Martin's opinion, the document issued last month left a fundamental tenet untouched: The path to possible ordination is still open to anyone, including homosexuals, who remain celibate and follow the church's moral teachings.
Martin is not alone. A high-profile array of European pastors and theologians have issued similar liberal interpretations of the Vatican's "instruction" on gay priests, which was formally released Nov. 29 after years of internal debates and redrafts.
Such views are squarely at odds with conservative Roman Catholic blocs, including some in the United States, that believe the church is in effect endorsing a blanket ban on gay priests. But the complications don't end there.
The cluttered response to the document - and its hard-to-define phrases such as "transitory" homosexuality - suggests many church leaders will increasingly follow their own standards for seminaries and ordination. Some experts say this could invite greater splits among Catholics on the hypersensitive issue of gays as spiritual leaders, which is already threatening the unity of Anglicans and some Protestant churches.
"We are seeing deja vu of the `Humanae Vitae' crisis," said the Rev. Anthony Figueiredo, referring to the 1968 papal encyclical that defined the church's opposition to artificial birth control and opened deep ideological fissures among Catholics.
"This struggle over gay clergy has the same risks of causing serious rifts within the church," added Figueiredo, a professor of theology at Seton Hall University and former seminary instructor at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University.
The first rumblings could be felt in parts of Europe, where congregations are traditionally more permissive and the priest shortage is even more acute than in the United States and other points on the Catholic map. Despite sex scandals like those that have plagued the U.S. church, European dioceses have not yet felt pressures for the kind of top-to-bottom inquests already under way in America.
The Congregation for Catholic Education - which produced the document on gays in the priesthood - is supervising inspections of all 229 U.S. seminaries to look for "evidence of homosexuality," among other things.
The congregation also sent a letter last month to bishops worldwide instructing them to bar priest or laymen "with homosexual tendencies" from being seminary rectors or teachers at seminaries.
"This document is going to be read very differently by a conservative African Catholic than, for example, a bishop here in Britain," said the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, the former master general of the Dominican order.
Not everyone at the Vatican even agreed it should be published, Radcliffe said. But pressure built for some kind of high-level church statement following the avalanche of U.S. sex abuse charges, even as gay rights groups complained that the focus on homosexuality was unfair.
There were expectations the Vatican could issue a definitive ban on gays entering the priesthood, but the final draft left critical areas open to a variety of views. It also only carried the weight of an "instruction," one of the weakest levels of authority for a Vatican-produced text.
The brief document advises that men with "deep-seated" gay tendencies or who "support so-called gay culture" shouldn't be admitted to seminary or ordained. Others with "transitory" homosexual inclinations can be accepted if they have "clearly overcome" them for three years.
"There were a lot of battles over whether to have the document and what the document would say," Radcliffe said. "Presumably this is reflected in the lack of clarity ... If the Vatican wanted a ban on gay seminarians, they would have made it clear."
Writing in the British Catholic journal The Tablet last month, Radcliffe pointed out the Vatican did not blackball men with "permanent homosexual orientation."
A statement from the Swiss bishops' conference asserted "a homosexual tendency lived out in sexual abstinence does not exclude one from pastoral ministry." The Dutch bishops also described the "celibate state of life" as more important than a seminarians sexual orientation.
"The question is not so much to know if a candidate is homosexual, but to distinguish his capacity for pastoral relations," said Auxiliary Bishop Herve Giraud, who heads the ordained ministry commission for the French bishops' conference. British Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor said he believes the document's message is not an outright rejection of gay clergy.
In the United States, Spokane Bishop William Skylstad, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote in October that "many wonderful and excellent priests in the church who have a gay orientation, are chaste and celibate, and are very effective ministers of the Gospel."
The Vatican fired back. In a Nov. 30 commentary in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, French Monsignor Tony Anatrella wrote that celibacy is not enough to allow ordination of a "deep-seated" homosexual because he cannot display the proper "spiritual paternity."
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