The Vatican may be about to make itself look ridiculous on the homosexuality issue, writes Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent.
The present incumbent of St Peter's chair is among the most conservative of men to become Pope in modern times.
His election last April 19th came as a great shock to those many Catholics, and others, who had hoped for a church leadership which would adapt a more sympathetic engagement with the world and the times we live in.
Standing in St Peter's Square - within seconds of his being presented to the crowds as Benedict XVI - I watched as all around jubilant young seminarians celebrated, while some older Catholics stood stunned into stillness.
If ever there was an illustration of a church divided, there it was. And if ever any single figure in the church could be said to bear a considerable responsibility for that division, there he was, waving to the crowds from the balcony of St Peter's Basilica, the new Pope.
Since that evening over five months ago many Catholics, and others, have been holding their breath to see what Benedict will do.
They have also been calling on that great Christian virtue, hope, to sustain them through their scepticism when they hear senior church figures say "he is not like that at all. In private he is a humble, courteous man. A shy, gentle scholar."
Those senior figures continue to assure us Benedict will be different now that he is in a different role - as his cardinal-electors did at media briefings across Rome on April 20th.
Yet, it is hard to see how this man as Pope can escape the straitjacket he created for himself and his papacy through his work as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He held the position from November 1981 until his election as Pope.
Arising from that legacy, some things are self-evident where this papacy is concerned.
There will be no change in the rule on clerical celibacy. There will be no discussion, even, on the issue of women priests. There will be no tolerance of inquiring/dissident theologians - even if he met Hans Küng recently.
There will be no, more embracing interpretation of scripture on issues of gender, sexuality, justice, relations with other Christian denominations, relations with other religions, and those of no religion at all.
Rather, there will be much emphasis on "respecting and accepting difference". As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in his Dominus Iesus document of 2000, he made clear just what that involves.
As a Protestant it means you must accept that in the eyes of the Catholic Church you do not belong to a church at all. Yours is an "ecclesial community". Your priests are not real priests, and your communion is not real communion.
Fine, it may be argued that belongs to his life before he became Pope.
But at an ecumenical meeting in Cologne on August 19th, Benedict began with a greeting to "the representatives of the other churches and ecclesial communities". The "churches" he referred to were the Orthodox, while "the ecclesial communities" were the Protestants.
Either the deep offence this denigration causes to Protestants has not been adequately conveyed to him, or he is indifferent to it.
It is difficult, however, to conclude that he is not aware of it.
At that meeting also he told those "representatives" that Christian unity "subsists, we are convinced, in the Catholic Church, without the possibility of ever being lost".
Being Protestant also means that you cannot receive communion in a Catholic Church. Unless you were the late Protestant Brother Roger of Taizé. At Pope John Paul's funeral no less a figure than Cardinal Ratzinger himself presented Brother Roger with communion.
Or unless you are the Anglican Tony Blair. But if you are the Baptist Bill Clinton visiting South Africa (in 1998) it would be wrong for you to receive communion in a Catholic Church, as he did in Soweto. And even if you are Tony Blair, it is wrong for you to receive communion in a Catholic church in Britain. But not in Italy.
In 1996, Tony Blair was stopped by the late cardinal Basil Hume from receiving communion at Mass in London with his Catholic wife and their Catholic children.
However, in 1998 he was allowed receive communion with his family in a Catholic church while on a holiday in Italy. The argument being that there was no Anglican church in the area. A sort of geographic relativism, perhaps!
And if you are a Catholic, like President Mary McAleese, it is "a sham" (in the words of former archbishop Desmond Connell) for you to receive communion at a Church of Ireland (Anglican) Eucharist, as she did in Dublin in December 1997.
This issue of inter-communion is very likely to be addressed at the Synod of Bishops, which continues through October in Rome. The emphasis is expected to be on restriction once again.
Where other religions are concerned, this accepting and respecting of difference means living with the Vatican view that as a Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc, you are in "a gravely deficient situation", according to Dominus Iesus.
In 1997 Cardinal Ratzinger even described Buddhism an "auto-erotic spirituality". Hinduism, he said then, was based on a "morally cruel" concept of reincarnation resembling "a continuous circle of hell".
You could be worse off. You could be a secularist, of which there is only one rung lower.
In his homily at Mass in St Peter's on April 18th, just before the conclave which elected him Pope began, Benedict warned against the "dictatorship of relativism", which he said recognised nothing as definite and for which the ultimate measure was simply one's own self and its desires.
It was an attack on, and misrepresentation of, secular humanism. Secular humanism does not promote selfishness, which is no more acceptable to the secularist than it is to the religious believer.
But bad and all as the situation is where secularists, Protestants, and followers of other religions are concerned, pity the homosexuals.
Respecting difference where gay people are concerned means accepting a Catholic view that you are, to quote from Cardinal Ratzinger in 1986, the subject of "a more or less strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder".
Now it appears he is about to ban gay men - even if celibate - from training for the priesthood.
A Vatican document on the matter is expected to be approved by him at the end of October.
Various studies have shown that a significant proportion of men who enter seminaries are gay.
Fr Donald Cozzens, former rector of a Catholic seminary in Ohio, wrote in his book The Changing Face of the Priesthood (2000) that about half of priests and seminarians were gay.
In March 1997 and before she was nominated for the presidency, Mary McAleese wrote in the Tablet that "women have observed the enormous drain of heterosexual males from the priesthood and the growing phenomenon of gay priests".
The Vatican intends to address this by stopping gay men from entering seminaries. But what of existing gay priests?
In April 2002 Pope Benedict's spokesman, Dr Joaquin Navarro-Valls, suggested that, just as a marriage can be annulled if the husband turns out to be gay, the ordination of gay men might also be made invalid.
What then of the church if the Vatican is to annul the ordination of gay priests?
Richard Sipe, a former Catholic priest and psychotherapist in the US, has written a number of books on clergy and sexuality issues.
He has said that if gays were to be banned from the priesthood "it would mean the resignation of at least a third of the bishops of the world". He added that this would go "against the tradition of the church; many saints had a gay orientation, and many popes had gay orientations".
The Vatican may be about to make itself look ridiculous.
Many would hold that at the root of all of this is a deeply-flawed thinking which strips people of their humanity, reducing them to a "disorder". It seems more barely-masked prejudice than truth.
The Catholic Church should know better. It has had similar experience with another minority.
Up to 1962, and despite the Holocaust, it retained the phase "perfidious (treacherous) Jews" in its Good Friday liturgy.
John Paul began the end of millennia of suspicion when in 1986 he was first Pope to visit a synagogue (in Rome).
In 1979 he visited Auschwitz. In 2000 he asked forgiveness in Jerusalem for the church's role in the persecution of Jewish people down the millennia and prayed, in Jewish fashion, at the Western Wall.
The day will yet come when a pope will beg forgiveness for the church's treatment of gay people.
A pope may yet remember, at Auschwitz or elsewhere, the gay people who died in Nazi concentration camps, and a pope may acknowledge how the church's teaching on homosexuality down the millennia helped validate the persecution of gay people.
And words such as "disorder" and "evil" will join "perfidious" as exiles from the Vatican's lexicon.
But not during this papacy.