Debate over gay clergy is testing many faiths

After three years of tortuous debate, leaked documents, and rumors, the Vatican appears ready today to formally ban most gays from Catholic seminaries and from ordination as priests. But Catholics are far from the only major denomination wrestling with the issue of homosexuals' fitness to serve as religious leaders.

Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Jews -- all are deeply divided on the matter. Many clergy and scholars say that ordination of gays is the most explosive issue in religion in the United States. It has the potential, they say, to create irreparable schisms between those who see the struggle as a continuation of efforts to secure full rights for minorities and women and others who find the Bible's statements against homosexuality too absolute and negative to be subject to reinterpretation.

Many religious leaders and scholars agree that at the heart of the controversy over whether to ordain gays is a more basic question: Is homosexuality a sin or a God-given trait? The question may have been answered in much of secular America, they say, but it remains explosive and largely unresolved among religious groups.

Nancy Ammerman, professor of the sociology of religion at Boston University, says most religious communities try to avoid engaging the question directly because of its potential to generate internal conflict and to divide their congregations.

''If you make the decision that homosexuality is something God-given, that you get at birth and that therefore is to be accepted, everything else flows from that: gay unions, gays in the ministry, everything," Ammerman said. ''If you decide homosexuality is a choice, or a bad choice, then all of those things go the other way, and you're likely to reject gays as members, reject gay unions, and reject gays in the clergy."

The Vatican document that is due out today states, according to newspapers and Catholic websites that say they have authentic copies, that the church ''cannot admit to the seminary and the sacred orders those who practice homosexuality, present deeply rooted homosexual tendencies, or support so-called gay culture."

The only stated exception would be for individuals with ''homosexual tendencies that might only be a manifestation of a transitory problem, as, for example, delayed adolescence." Such tendencies ''must be clearly overcome at least three years before" ordination, the document states.

At the same time, however, Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley of Boston and others have extended a conciliatory hand to homosexual Catholics. In a letter sent to Boston-area parishes for dissemination last weekend, O'Malley called for an end to prejudice against homosexuals and said that ''many homosexual persons in our Church lead holy lives."

The two steps -- barring gay priests and reaching out to homosexuals in the community -- put Catholics somewhere in the middle between the most conservative US religious organizations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, and the most liberal, such as the United Church of Christ.

The Southern Baptist constitution stipulates that no local church that acts ''to affirm, approve, or endorse homosexual behavior" can be part of the organization. The United Church of Christ advocates complete equality and acceptance and currently has an article about OUT magazine's list of the most intriguing gay men, lesbians, and straight allies of the year posted at the top of its website.

Many denominations instead follow a ''don't ask, don't tell" policy: No effort is made to determine sexual preferences of divinity students and clergy, and seminarians and ministers are expected not to make a point of having a homosexual orientation. Other denominations debate the matter openly.

''There is an across-the-board divide in religion between those who hold a more inclusive view of the world and those who have a more exclusive vision," says Bishop Steven Charleston, president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, who believes that sexuality should not be a factor in determining fitness for ministry. ''It is dividing churches as it is dividing countries, into red states and blue states, into people who think the war in Iraq is great and people who think it is crazy."

Charleston characterized the debate in the ministry and in society as ''the third act of a play that began in the last century."

''The first act was over race, the second was over women's rights," he said.

But the Rev. Paul Zahl of Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa., an Episcopal seminary where ordination of sexually active gay clergy is opposed by most faculty and students, strongly rejected Charleston's characterization of the struggle.

The issue of ordaining people who are practicing homosexuality ''is very difficult to reconcile [with] what the Bible teaches and the church has traditionally taught," Zahl said. ''There is a feeling of allegiance to the Bible which we find hard to throw over without working it through. For us to accept this innovation, it would have to be demonstrated with great clarity that the Scripture was somehow mistaken and that the tradition of the church was in fact flawed."

These opposing views have been in direct conflict since the election of the Rev. V. Gene Robinson in June 2003 as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire. Robinson is the first openly gay bishop in the history of Christendom, and many Episcopalians and outside observers say that the continuing controversy over his election could lead to a split in the denomination when Episcopalians hold their general convention in Columbus, Ohio, next summer.

Methodists, said the Rev. Robert C. Neville, a longtime dean of the Boston University School of Theology, ''do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching . . . but we implore families and churches not to reject or condemn their lesbian and gay members and friends."

The debate over ordaining homosexuals as ministers, he said, remains unresolved. This, Neville said, has led to a situation among Methodists in which ''if you are homosexual and public about it, but are celibate, that's OK. If you are homosexual and in the closet, sexually active, that's OK. If you are sexually active and 'out,' that is forbidden."

Among Jews, the Reform movement, the largest stream of Judaism in the United States, has long accepted gays as seminarians and rabbis. Orthodox Judaism, the most literal of the three streams of Judaism in its understanding of the Torah, does not accept openly gay men in its houses of religious study or in the rabbinate.

Leaders in Conservative Judaism, which occupies a middle ground, turned down a proposal in 1992 for seminaries to admit openly gay applicants, but rabbis following the debate say the subject is being raised again. And, they add, the question of whether to ordain gay rabbis will be one of the most critical issues in determining the next leader of the movement.

Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com.