The most likely outcome to the Vatican's instruction on homosexuals and the priesthood will be to damage further the authority of the papacy, writes Religious Affairs Correspondent Patsy McGarry
There is, the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, a time for everything under heaven. "A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted"
Following yesterday's publication - finally - of the Vatican's much-leaked Instruction concerning the criteria of vocational discernment regarding persons with homosexual tendencies, considering their admission to seminary and to Holy Orders, let us be grateful. For it is time.
Rome has this time gone so overboard on the homosexuality issue its primary achievement would appear to be the undermining of its own authority.
Yesterday we were told once more that not only are gay people objectively disordered and prone to the intrinsically evil but now we are also to believe homosexuals cannot relate "correctly" to either men or women.
They are just not people in the proper sense.
And it seems it is this latter understanding of gay people that precludes even those of them who are male and celibate from ever becoming priests.
That so many are already priests is not addressed. Are we expected to treat them too - men who "present deep-seated homosexual tendencies" or support the so-called "gay culture" as seriously deficient people who are "in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women"?
Yes, let us be grateful.
In the past very many were deeply worried that the teachings of the world's largest Christian denomination could be used to foment, if not justify, one of society's most intractable prejudices against one of its most vulnerable minorities, but now it is possible to feel more free to react "is that so?" while blithely moving along.
But you have to wonder at the understanding of human sexuality involved.
Speaking in Dublin's Christ Church Cathedral earlier this month, in the aftermath of the Ferns Report, the Bishop of Killaloe, Dr Willie Walsh, asked whether the evils uncovered in that report were the result of "an unhealthy or distorted understanding of the meaning and purpose of the gift of sexuality?"
A similar question is provoked by yesterday's Vatican instruction.
A little delving makes it clear that it was Pope Benedict himself who reverted to the more primitive view of homosexuality - as being a choice rather than condition.
It is, to him, indicative of a lack of that "affective maturity" which, the instruction says, enables a priest "to relate correctly to both men and women, developing in him a true sense of spiritual fatherhood towards the church community that will be entrusted to him".
The Pope's apologists will argue that preparation of the instruction was initiated by pope John Paul in the early 1990s and that Pope Benedict "inherited" it.
But that is too simple. His influence is all over it, not least from his days as prefect at the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), a position he held from 1981 until he was elected pope last April.
At the CDF, he "adjusted" the church's understanding of homosexuality. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1994, taught that "the number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. They do not choose their homosexual condition; for most of them it is a trial." The second sentence in that quote is no longer in the catechism. Its official Latin version was published in 1997. The line, "They do not choose their homosexual condition; for most of them it is a trial" had been dropped. It was replaced with, "This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial."
An understanding of homosexuality as a condition which is not chosen was dropped, and the inclination had also become "objectively disordered".
Pope Benedict, as cardinal Ratzinger, co-ordinated the Latin changes to the cathechism.
Those changes also brought the catechism more into line with his 1986 description of homosexuality as "a more or less strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder".
There is, of course, another subtext to all of this. Three years ago, following many revelations of clerical child sex abuse in the US, the Vatican press office announced that the Congregation for Catholic Education, which published yesterday's instruction, said it was preparing guidelines for accepting candidates to the priesthood that would address whether homosexuals should be accepted.
This announcement was in direct response to those US scandals and particularly to reports that such clerical child sex abuse in the US involved boys in 80 per cent of cases.
It is also hardly coincidental that this month "visitations" have begun to all US seminaries, which are to be "inspected" to establish whether proper priest formation programmes are being employed in each, with particular attention paid as to whether a homosexual sub-culture may exist in any.
Yet again this, and yesterday's instruction, suggest Rome is confusing paedophilia with homosexuality.
The Ferns report drew a clear distinction between the two. Its expert group (made up of six therapists with experience of working with priests who had sexually abused children) was "unanimous" in its view that homosexuality was not a factor in increasing the risk to children (of abuse).
"It [ homosexuality] would be seen as a factor in increasing the risk to adolescent boys but no more than a heterosexual priest would be a risk to adolescent girls," the group concluded.
The report continued that one of these experts, Joseph O'Sullivan, told the Ferns inquiry, "it's easy to make the link between someone abusing boys and being homosexual but would we call someone who sexually abuses 12- and 13-year-old girls heterosexual? No, we wouldn't; we'd call them a child abuser."
That Ferns expert group was also "unanimous" in its view that "the vow of celibacy contributed to the problem of sexual abuse in the church".
On Sunday, October 23rd - two days, coincidentally, before publication of the Ferns report - Pope Benedict announced the celibacy rule for priests was to stay.
On August 31st last he personally approved and ordered publication of yesterday's instruction on homosexuals and the priesthood.
It seems his papacy is on a path similar to that chosen by pope Paul VI in 1968 when he published Humanae Vitae.
That encyclical banned the use of artificial means of contraception and has been more honoured in the breach than the observance.
Its greatest casualty was respect for Rome's authority. That authority was eroded still further by yesterday's instruction.