Page 11, 7th November 2008

7th November 2008

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Page 11, 7th November 2008 — Psychological tests should be handled with care
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Psychological tests should be handled with care

The Vatican has released a new set of guidelines for the psychological screening of candidates for the priesthood that are designed to weed out men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies. In doing so, it is using the same language as a 2005 document which likewise made a distinction between "deep-seated" and "fleeting" gay inclinatiOns. That is an important fact to bear in mind. Rome's official policy on homosexual seminarians has not changed.
Quite what the distinction means, however, is still not entirely clear. If by "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies the Vatican means impulses that are likely to lead a priest to break his sacred vow of chastity, then they should indeed be a barrier to ordination. So should heterosexual tendencies that seriously endanger chastity. Unfortunately, in presenting the document, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, Prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, appears to have presented his own gloss on it.
Put under pressure at a press conference, he implied that "strong heterosexual tendencies" were less of a barrier to priesthood than equivalent homosexual tendencies, because the latter opened up a special type of "wound in the exercise of the priesthood in forming relations with others". What is the source of this theory? It sounds as if Cardinal Grocholewski was improvising — and, in so doing, reawakening ideas against gay men based on antiquated prejudice. The purity of a priest's celibacy is not determined by the nature of the urges he is restraining in obedience to Christ's teaching.
But we are criticising the cardinal, not the document, which has some very sensible things to say. The Church is right to acknowledge formally what every diocesan bishop should know: that properly administered, voluntary testing can help identify men who — for a number of reasons, not all of them sexual — are unsuited to the exercise of priestly ministry. If it had been applied sensibly years ago, then the Church would have been able to identify some (though by no means all) paedophiles before they were ordained, thus sparing their victims a shocking ordeal. The Vatican knows this, which is presumably the reason for issuing this document.
On the other hand, psychological tests must not be used by seminary rectors to discriminate against good candidates whose conservatism they happen to dislike. We do not want to labour the point; but it has happened in the past, and should never happen again.




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