The Vatican's document on homosexuality and priesthood, published yesterday, has been described as "deeply discriminatory" where gay people are concerned. There has also been a call for Ireland's Catholic bishops to back a statement last September by Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin that gay people should be admitted to the priesthood on the same basis as heterosexuals - that they are celibate.
Yesterday's document, an instruction from the Congregation of Catholic Education, said the church "cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practise homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called 'gay culture'".
However, men who experienced homosexual tendencies of a "transitory" nature, as in "an adolescence not yet superseded"could be admitted to seminaries when such tendencies had been "clearly overcome at least three years before ordination to the diaconate".
Men are ordained deacons usually a year, possibly two, before being ordained a priest.
Ciarán McKinny, director of gay HIV strategies at the Gay and Lesbian Network in Dublin said it was "deeply immoral of the church" to try to "scapegoat an element of the population while not addressing the crime [ of clerical child sex abuse]".
He felt "a sense of dismay at the language and tone of the document and its use of really unacceptable words", not least in its reference to so-called gay culture.
He had been encouraged by the words of Archbishop Martin and asked that the other Irish bishops "make public a statement along the same lines". He said it was not enough for the bishops to say, 'Oh well, no action will be taken' on the instruction. Archbishop Martin was not available to comment yesterday.
Senator David Norris felt the Vatican was "getting into Orwellian territory" where it talked about so-called gay culture in the document. This was "very dangerous" and reflective of "thought control", he said.
He said Pope Benedict seemed to have an obsession with homosexuality and suggested he declare his own personal position on the matter, not least as he felt he could investigate the sexuality of his priests. "He should be frank with us," Senator Norris said.
He said the document brought into sharp focus "the supine voters of the Irish parliament who granted exemption to the church from equality legislation, making it possible for it to ban from working as doctors or teachers decent, respectable people".
Colm O'Gorman of the One in Four charity expressed concern "that the Roman Catholic Church continues to 'blame' recent clerical sexual abuse scandals on homosexuality, therefore deflecting from and denying the institutional failure that is in fact responsible for clerical sexual abuse".