Schools Relations with: The canon law of the Roman Catholic Church requires that clerics "observe perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven";[1] for this reason, priests in Roman Catholic dioceses make vows of celibacy at their ordination, thereby agreeing to remain unmarried and abstinent throughout their lives.
[2] In 2005, the Church clarified that men with "deeply rooted homosexual tendencies" could not be ordained; the Vatican followed up in 2008 with a directive to implement psychological screening for candidates for the priesthood.
[2] In November 2005, the Vatican completed an Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders.
[10] Two months before his death in 2005, Pope John Paul II, troubled by the sex scandals in the US, Austria, and Ireland,[7] had written to the Congregation for Catholic Education: "Right from the moment young men enter a Seminary their ability to live a life of celibacy should be monitored so that before their ordination one should be morally certain of their sexual and emotional maturity.
Catholics on the religious right have tried to connect the incidence of homosexuality within the priesthood to the sexual abuse scandal facing the Church arguing, according to gay social critic Andrew Sullivan, that the direct root "was not abuse of power, or pedophilia, or clericalism, or the distortive psychological effects of celibacy and institutional homophobia, but gayness itself.
[15] Peter Damian, in the 11th century, wrote a book called the Liber Gomorrhianus about homosexuality among the clergy in his own time period.
[16] In 1102, Anselm of Canterbury demanded that the punishment for homosexuality should be moderate because "this sin has been so public that hardly anyone has blushed for it, and many therefore have plunged into it without realising its gravity".
He called for all statements from the Holy See that are offensive and violent against gay people to be withdrawn, citing Pope Benedict XVI's signature of the 2005 document that forbids men with deep-rooted homosexual tendencies from becoming priests as particularly "diabolical".
[19] Studies find it difficult to quantify specific percentages of Roman Catholic priests who have a homosexual orientation (either openly gay or closeted) in the United States.
[4][22] Studies by James Wolf and by Richard Sipe from the early 1990s suggest that the percentage of priests in the Catholic Church who admitted to being gay or were in homosexual relationships was well above the national average for the country.
[23] Elizabeth Stuart, a former convener of the Catholic Caucus of the Lesbian and Gay Christian movement claimed, "It has been estimated that at least 33 percent of all priests in the RC Church in the United States are homosexual.
"[24] The John Jay Report published in 2004 suggested that "homosexual men entered the seminaries in noticeable numbers from the late 1970s through the 1980s".
[25] Another report suggested that from the mid-1980s onwards, Catholic priests in the US were dying from AIDS-related illnesses at a rate four times higher than that of the general population, with most of the cases contracted through gay sex, and the cause often concealed on their death certificates.
[31] A number of senior members of the clergy have been alleged to have engaged in homosexual activity: The General Chapter of the Dominican Order held in Caleruega in 1995 "affirmed that the same demands of chastity apply to all brethren of whatever sexual orientation, and so no one can be excluded on this ground.
"[36] As stated in the Acts of the General Chapter of Diffinitors of the Order of Friars Preachers meeting, the text read "as a radical demand, the vow of chastity is equally binding on homosexuals and heterosexuals.