Gay priests face Catholic ban

The Roman Catholic Church will bar homosexuals from becoming priests even if they have no intention of being sexually active.

The tough directive, to be signed by Pope Benedict XVI as an "instruction", is expected to be published after the international synod of bishops in Rome next month.

Scotching rumours that the controversial document had been shelved, a church official in Rome said: "The matter is not now if it will be published, but when."

The document will lend substance to Pope Benedict's desire to "purify" a church whose reputation has been besmirched - in the United States and elsewhere - by a devastating paedophilia crisis implicating thousands of ordained priests, 81 per cent of whose victims were adolescent boys.

A study of the gay presence in many American Catholic seminaries has intensified calls by conservatives to block gays from becoming priests.

In Goodbye, Good Men, United States journalist Michael Rose interviewed 125 people from 22 seminaries and claimed to have identified "a pervasive 'gay subculture' of both students and faculty".

Rose said heterosexual men of orthodox tendencies who were accepted for seminaries such as St Mary's in Baltimore, nicknamed the Pink Palace, found themselves under siege by homosexual students. The Pope's hostility to homosexuality has been known for years - in contrast to Pope John Paul II, who took little action even after the paedophilia storm broke in 2002. Archbishop Bernard Law, of Boston, where there was much abuse, was removed from his archdiocese but given a cosy job in Rome.

Pope Benedict put his views on record as long ago as 1986. Homosexuality, he wrote, was "a more or less strong tendency ordered towards an inherent moral evil".

As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, he banned declared gays from Mass and closed down gay organisations within the church. Since he became Pope the church has stepped up its hostility to gay marriage, and the recognition of gay partnerships condoned by civil law. The church official in Rome said the ban would affect candidates for priesthood but not men already ordained.

Estimates on the proportion of gay Catholic priests range from 10 to 60 per cent. The official said the ban would apply even to men of homosexual inclination who were celibate, because the all-male seminaries could present overwhelming temptation.

"The difference is the special atmosphere ... in the seminary you are surrounded by males, not females."

- Independent