c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The nation’s Catholic bishops will consider new pastoral guidelines in November for ministering to gays and lesbians that affirm traditional church teachings on sexuality in the face of a quickly changing culture.

Issues like same-sex marriage and civil unions, gay adoption and the clergy sexual abuse scandal were barely on the bishops’ radar screen in 1997, the last time the U.S. bishops addressed ministry to homosexuals in detail.

With one eye on those domestic controversies and another on Rome, the new guidelines are the bishops’ first attempt to forge a consensus on the role of gays and lesbians in the church.

“They grew out of a real concern from the bishops that they want to minister to homosexual Catholics and at the same time make sure that it’s done properly,” said the Rev. Tom Weinandy, executive director of the bishops’ Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices, which drafted the guidelines.

In development since 2002, the new 23-page “Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination: Guidelines for Pastoral Care,” will be debated and voted on at the bishops’ annual fall meeting Nov. 13-16 in Baltimore.

According to an early draft, the proposed guidelines:

_ Welcome celibate gays to take part in parish life while asserting the church’s “right to deny roles of service to those whose behavior violates her teaching.”

_ Mandate that church ministers must not bless same-sex unions or marriages or promote them in any way.

_ Caution that public announcements of one’s sexual orientation “are not helpful and should not be encouraged.”

_ Specify that while baptism of children adopted by gay couples “represents a pastoral concern,” nevertheless “the church does not refuse the Sacrament of Baptism to these children.”

_ Warn those in Catholic ministry not to advocate against church teachings or adopt a position of “distant neutrality” toward them.

The guidelines _ particularly those dealing with Catholic ministries _ are rife with references to documents produced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office headed by Pope Benedict XVI from 1981 until his election as pope in 2005.

In fact, the bishops’ committee on doctrine began working on the guidelines in 2002, “with some encouragement” from the pope’s old office, according to a cover letter attached to the draft.

“I think the concern there was _ that the bishops here in the U.S. were aware of as well _ that there were certain groups ministering to homosexuals but doing so in a way that was contrary to the teaching of the Catholic church,” Weinandy said.

Weinandy said the final push for the guidelines came in 1999, when Benedict_ then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger _ silenced Sister Jeannine Gramick, an American nun who ministered to gay and lesbian Catholics, for publicly disagreeing with the church’s position on homosexuality.

Rocco Palmo, a correspondent for British Catholic magazine The Tablet and a widely watched observer of Vatican-U.S. affairs on his blog “Whispers in the Loggia,” said that the guidelines “were basically being run by Rome.”

Palmo pointed out that the project began under the direction of Cardinal William Levada, the former archbishop of San Francisco, who Benedict tapped to be his successor at the Vatican’s doctrinal office.

The guidelines’ “pastoral openness” as well as “leaps” in some areas _ such as the willingness to baptize the adopted children of gay couples _ would not be possible if the bishops weren’t sure that they were “theologically bulletproof,” Palmo said.

But Francis DeBarnardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, the Catholic gay-rights group formerly headed by Gramick, said the new guidelines rely too much on the Vatican.

“This is a Roman document; this is not an American bishops’ document,” he said.

Whereas American bishops had emphasized social justice in their ministry to gay and lesbian Catholics, the new guidelines are overly consumed with sexual ethics, DeBarnardo said.

Both DeBarnardo and Sam Sinnett, president of DignityUSA, which represents gay and lesbian Catholics, criticized the bishops for not consulting with gay or lesbian groups while drawing up the guidelines.

“The bishops are very much like a doctor who won’t see the patient, won’t talk to the patient, dismisses all the medical knowledge of the last 100 years and then presumes to tell you the cure,” Sinnett said.

Weinandy said the bishops on the committee spoke to people in their dioceses who minister to homosexuals but not to gay and lesbian Catholics themselves.

“The reason there is that we are writing the guidelines for them,” Weinandy said. “We didn’t want to politicize the thing and take people in all directions.”

KRE/JL END BURKEEditors: See related sidebar, RNS-BISHOPS-ISSUES, for an outline of other items on the bishops’ agenda for the Baltimore meeting.