ROME - The Vatican is internally circulating draft proposals that would bar homosexual men from becoming priests, a policy long discussed within the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy but getting attention in the wake of sexual abuse scandals in the United States.
No action to bar gay men from seminaries is likely any time soon, a senior Vatican official said yesterday. The official said the document, which originated in the Vatican department responsible for Roman Catholic education, is being passed around for comment.
Meanwhile, the Catholic bishops of the United States are awaiting a Vatican judgment on policies they adopted in June that would remove sexually abusive priests from parish work and possibly defrock them. Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, is scheduled to arrive in Rome this weekend to receive the Vatican decision on the policies.
Catholic legal specialists and Vatican officials have indicated that they believe the US rules conflict with internal church law and therefore may not get a full endorsement. According to some reports, the US standards may receive approval only on an experimental basis.
The wave of sex abuse scandals in the US Catholic church ignited a debate over whether homosexuality played a role. The equating of homosexuality and abuse roiled critics who say there is no evidence homosexuals are more likely to engage in abuse than heterosexuals.
All sides agree that many gay men have been ordained. Gregory has said there was an ''ongoing struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men.''
A survey carried out last year by the Catholic University of America found that 41 percent of US priests said that a gay subculture ''clearly'' or ''probably'' existed in seminaries where they studied and 55 percent said the same for their parishes or religious institutes.
According to Catholic News Service, which first reported on the Vatican's draft document, the proposal argues that gay men should not be ordained because the Catholic Church regards homosexuality as ''objectively disordered.'' In effect, gay orientation would be enough to bar ordination, even if the candidate embraced celibacy.
In the United States, there has been quiet but persistent disagreement among Catholic Church leaders about the ordination of priests who have a homosexual orientation. Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington has said that the key question is not whether a candidate for priesthood has homosexual inclinations, but whether he is able to live in perpetual celibacy.
Some other prelates, such as Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, take the position that Catholic seminaries should exclude any candidate who has a history of homosexual activity or who discloses a homosexual orientation, regardless of whether he has acted on it.
When a heterosexual man joins the priesthood, Bevilacqua has said, he gives up a ''good thing,'' while a homosexual who takes a vow of celibacy ''is giving up what the church considers an abomination.''
Despite their difference views, each camp supports rigorous psychological testing of candidates for the priesthood to weed out potential sex abusers, a practice now standard in all US seminaries.
Neither camp suggests that it is realistic to try to remove gay men who have already been ordained.