ROME — The Vatican on Tuesday formally released instructions that block actively gay men from the priesthood, a long-anticipated document that already has opened a debate over how it will be applied and whether it will have a healing, or detrimental, effect on the Roman Catholic Church.
Church conservatives are applauding the document for taking a strong stance against what many see as an immoral "gay subculture" within seminaries and church life, and for establishing clearer restrictions on who is suitable to become a priest.
But liberals said they feared the rules would be used to keep qualified men out of a depleted priesthood because of their sexual identity, even when celibate.
This is the first major instruction to be issued by Pope Benedict XVI, and the fact that it focused on homosexuality reflected the German pontiff's concern over morals he sees being eroded by Western secular culture.
Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, author of the eight-page document as prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, said Tuesday that it was crucial for the church to speak out now.
"Many are defending a position in which the homosexual condition is considered a normal condition of the human being, almost like a third gender," Grocholewski told Vatican Radio. "That absolutely contradicts human anthropology, and, according to the church, contradicts natural law."
The document, which was leaked in its entirety last week on a Catholic news website, says that men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" or who support a "gay culture" may not become priests. But men who have "overcome" a homosexuality that was "transitory" and who have remained celibate for three years before joining the seminary are eligible.
Father Robert Gahl, a theologian, praised the document for establishing "more challenging expectations" for men who want to become priests. Homosexuals are clearly barred, he said, because the rules require a man with homosexual tendencies not only to have lived a celibate life but to have overcome those tendencies long before entering the seminary.
"Anyone who considers himself homosexual ought to realize that as such, the church is not calling him to the priesthood," said Gahl, who teaches at Rome's St. Cross Pontifical University, which is run by the conservative Opus Dei organization.
