A copy of the planned statement by the Pope on gay priests has been leaked prior to publication (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4463748.stm). The full text is at http://www.adistaonline.it/congregatio.PDF, but your Italian needs to be better than mine to get all the nuances. What it seems to imply is that candidates for the priesthood will not be accepted if they are gay, regardless of whether or not they are committed to/capable of celibacy. Their orientation alone is seen as preventing them being suitable for the priesthood.

I can see why the Vatican might be panicking in response to all the sexual scandals that have come out recently about abusive Catholic priests. But this ruling seems to me to be sending extremely negative signals to any gay Catholics. All the Vatican claims that they should not be discriminated about ring pretty hollow. The ruling implies that while straight priests can withstand the temptations to break the vows of celibacy, gays cannot. Gays are thus seen not only as ‘objectively disordered’, but implicitly as incapable of celibacy. This view is in odd contrast to the hardline Protestant view, in which straight men can only rarely be expected to be celibate (and hence a married priesthood must be allowed), but gays of either sex must be celibate, since they have no legitimate means of expressing their sexuality.

The Catholic church’s rejection of celibate gays also seems to me to be an historically odd view of celibacy. The point about celibacy is abstention from sex: what you abstain from is secondary. The Desert Fathers knew that women, boys and even the monastic donkeys could be a temptation. (Peter Brown, ‘The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity’ has lots of racy anecdotes, plus very sympathetic analysis of the theology). There are several medieval monks/clerics who have been frequently been suspected as being celibate gays: Aelred of Rievaulx is the most commonly mentioned example.

The real problem, in the end, may be less about sexual orientation than power. There’s an interesting article in the latest London Review of Books on the Irish scandals (see http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n23/toib01_.html). Colm Tóibín comments:

When the Ferns Report came out, I was eager to read it because I had known these three men. I had believed that the problem lay in their becoming priests. If they had gone to Holland or San Francisco, I believed, they would now be happily married to their boyfriends. But as I read the report, I began to think that this was hardly the issue. Instead, the level of abuse in Ferns and the Church’s way of handling it seemed an almost intrinsic part of the Church’s search for power.

But for the Catholic church to change its view on the power and status of priests would open a whole different can of worms.