Vatican City - The Roman Catholic Church is about to ban men even suspected of latent homosexual tendencies from training as priests, sources close to the Vatican told AFP.
The sources said the Vatican will recommend mobilizing all the resources of modern psychology to weed out even those with homosexual thoughts.
Openly homosexual men already are barred from the priesthood, although this has not prevented gay scandals in several seminaries and an epidemic of priestly paedophilia.
Several specialized publications recently have alluded to a new document on priestly training intended for bishops and directors of seminaries, the Catholic training institutes.
A Vatican official said, however, that there were no plans to publish the document immediately.
But the measure has been under preparation for the past three years by the Vatican congregation for Catholic education, which is in charge of seminary training.
The congregation began drawing up the document after the issue of priestly paedophilia exploded in the United States.
The text reflects the view among some Catholics -- but disputed by others -- that the presence of gay clergy in the Church's ranks was to blame for the string of child abuse scandals.
Traumatized by unrelenting attacks by the media and victims, US Catholic bishops in 2000 issued new rules in Dallas, which among other things told bishops to "employ adequate screening and evaluative techniques in deciding the fitness of candidates for ordination."
In 2002, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, then secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, declared that "people having a homosexual inclination should not be admitted into seminaries." The congregation was headed by
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
About the same time, the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship published a recommendation that "a homosexual person, or one having a homosexual tendency, is not fit to receive the sacrament of ordination."
The Roman Catholic Church broke off its attempt to find doctrinal common ground with the Anglican communion in December last year following the appointment of an openly homosexual bishop by US Anglicans.
Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical council for the promotion of Christian unity, said on that occasion that it was no longer possible "to affirm that the moral principles that guide human sexuality were largely shared by Catholics and Anglicans."
The Church calls homosexuality "intrinsically wrong." As long ago as 1986, the Vatican said that homosexual thoughts should be considered "objectively disordered" even if they did not lead to active homosexuality.
The French Church has quietly barred priestly candidates with gay tendencies since 1996.
In 2002, Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the United States conference of Catholic bishops, stressed that it was necessary not only to ensure that seminarians were not controlled by homosexuals, but also that candidates for the priesthood were "healthy psychologically, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually."