Tuesday’s RNS report offers three articles on the Vatican’s official document on gay priests, release today, Nov. 29.

Stacy Meichtry reports from the Vatican City: The Vatican officially published a document Tuesday (Nov. 29) that bars openly gay men from entering the priesthood and followed that up with an editorial rejecting homosexuality as abnormal. Critics had claimed that the widely leaked document’s ban on men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” is ambiguous and open to interpretation by local church officials. But the Vatican forcefully responded Tuesday, reasserting its claim that homosexuality is a condition akin to a medical disorder rather than a fixed sexual identity or orientation. Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, prefect of the Vatican department that issued the document, defended the ban, saying it is wrong to consider homosexuality “a normal condition of the human person-almost like a third gender.”

Kevin Eckstrom’s analysis suggests that the new rules on gays are unlikely to change seminary life. He recently visited Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitburg, Md.: When Joe Yokum was considering a call to the Catholic priesthood, the first question a seminary official asked him was, “Do you consider yourself to be a homosexual man?” If Yokum, 27, had answered yes, he probably would have been denied admission-even before Tuesday’s (Nov. 29) release of new Vatican rules that are designed to keep men with “deep-rooted homosexual tendencies” from becoming priests. Here at America’s second-largest Catholic seminary, longstanding processes to “filter out” gay men have been in place. Church officials hope the new rules will codify for all seminaries what has been unwritten-and sometimes unenforced-policy for almost 45 years. If Mount St. Mary’s is any indication, the new policies will not change the day-to-day life at America’s 196 Catholic seminaries.

A former Catholic priest, however, predicts a gay exodus from the priesthood. Jeff Diamant writes: He left the Catholic priesthood in 1998, he said, because he was tired of shielding his identity as a gay man from a church that condemns homosexuality. The Rev. Mariano Gargiulo, now an Episcopal priest, says he believes Tuesday’s expected Vatican edict banning most gay men from entering the seminary also will force many priests from the clergy. Gargiulo, who says he remains friends with dozens of gay Catholic priestsfrom his days in the Archdiocese of Newark, predicts that the ruling, while not applying to current priests, will heighten tensions within the church. “It will push many of them away,” Gargiulo says. From his office at St. James Episcopal Church in Ridgefield, N.J., Gargiulo discusses his experience as a possible template for what many other gay priests-especially noncelibate ones-may do now that the Vatican document is released.