A VATICAN ruling on homosexuals entering the priesthood received a surprising welcome from leading Roman Catholics in Britain yesterday after it became clear that it was not as severe as had been feared. However, gay pressure groups and liberal Catholics were critical.

Senior Catholics said that the ruling showed a slight softening of Pope Benedict XVI’s hard line against gays. The instruction from the Congregation for Catholic Education said that ordination was not permissible for men with “deep-seated” gay tendencies but was permissible for those who could show they had overcome “transitory” homosexuality for three years. It does not apply to those already ordained.

The instruction was welcomed by moderates because it is not an outright ban on all men of homosexual orientation, celibate or not, but it will disappoint traditionalists because it does not call homosexuality a “tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil”, a phrase used by the Pope in his previous post as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac MurphyO’Connor, said: “A priest is primarily a witness to Jesus Christ. Anything that detracts from this impedes that witness.

“Priests are required to live lives of celibate chastity, whatever their sexual orientation, and must be able to relate freely and well to both men and women. Bishops must ensure that men are not admitted to the priesthood for whom its requirements and demands will be too burdensome or impossible to fulfil.

“The instruction is not saying that men of homosexual orientation are not welcome in the priesthood. But it is making clear that they must be capable of affective maturity, have a capacity for celibacy and not share the values of the eroticised gay culture. This is especially important because seminaries are all-male environments.”

In 2004 the bishops of England and Wales said that “a homosexual orientation” was not sinful or evil in itself.

The Cardinal said: “The Church utterly condemns all forms of unjust discrimination, harassment or abuse directed against people who have homosexual tendencies.”

The Vatican ruling was attacked by Peter Tatchell, of the gay rights group OutRage!, who said it was “bigoted and hypocritical”. He said: “If these rules had existed in the past, many existing archbishops and cardinals would have never been allowed to enter the priesthood. Given the high proportion of gay clergy in senior positions in the Vatican, this new policy is rank hypocrisy.

“Given that about a third of Catholic clergy in Britain are gay, the new rules are an own goal that could result in hundreds of churches being left without priests.”

He added that the Church should concentrate on eliminating child sex abusers from the priesthood.Widespread child abuse by Catholic priests has been revealed in the United States and other countries. The Boston Archdiocese agreed to pay £49 million to more than 500 victims in 2003. Last week a Brazilian priest was jailed for 14 years for abusing two children, and Italian police said yesterday that a priest in Tuscany had confessed to molesting 30 boys over the past five years.

Damian Thompson, editor-in-chief of The Catholic Herald, said the Vatican ruling was “a highly intelligent compromise”. He added: “It is not nearly as bad as the gay community was expecting. They were fearing a blanket ban on the ordination of anyone under any circumstances who was gay.”

He conceded that the reference in the document to “deep-seated homosexuality” would offend many but said that the document’s references to showing “respect” for gay people were also signs of a softening attitude. “All this is language that would have been inconceivable coming from the Vatican in the 1980s. The gay community was really worried that Benedict was going to come out with a blanket ban.”

Father Timothy Radcliffe, former Master of the Dominicans, said that it would not be correct to interpret the document as ruling out men with a permanent homosexual orientation as there were “many excellent priests” who were gay and who clearly had a vocation.

The Human Rights Campaign, a gay pressure group based in the US, said gays were being used as scapegoats and called on “all fair minded Catholics” to protest to their local priests. “We urge them to consider what Jesus would do if he saw his neighbour treated this way,” the group said.

Father Donald Cozzens of John Carroll University, a Jesuit foundation in Cleveland, Ohio, said: “Our seminaries are likely to be depopulated to a significant extent.” He added that the hunters might become the hunted, suggesting there were “hidden” gays in the Vatican.

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