As matters in the Middle East continue to galvanize Americans and occupy their attention, it is well worth remembering — despite what CNN and Fox News might lead you to believe — that in other parts of the world, life is marching on. While the United States has remained fixated on its exercise in Iraq, the Vatican has been at work quietly drafting a document that may bar homosexuals from the Roman Catholic priesthood.

It is unlikely that such a document will reach the public before the summer. Speculation, however, is that it will recommend the restriction or stringent scrutiny of prospective priests if they profess or appear to display homosexual tendencies.

The document is ostensibly part of the Vatican’s continued response to the sex scandals that have plagued it publicly for well over a year. Yet, it proves further that the Vatican’s fundamental misapprehension of the scandals lies in its delusions concerning human sexuality.

The attention shifted onto bisexual and homosexual priests in light of the abuse scandals has unfairly demonized those sexual orientations as responsible for pedophilia. As news of the abuses began to make headlines over a year ago, a Vatican spokesman immediately came out against homosexuality, demonizing it as a direct cause of pedophilia. “”People with [homosexual] inclinations just cannot be ordained,”” Joaquin Navarro-Valls said to the press in March 2002.

Psychiatrists have identified homosexuality as a “”risk factor”” for cases of pedophilia. But Dr. Martin Kafka, who recently advised the Pontifical Academy for Life on the abuse crisis in the priesthood, stressed that “”a risk factor is not a cause.””

It has been the tendency of outspoken Catholic clergy to collapse the two, however, shifting the blame onto homosexuals as though their orientation were an automatic guarantor of abuse. The comment of the Vatican spokesman, above, is just one example of this line of thinking.

Around the same time as Navarro-Valls’ comment came to the public, Monsignor Eugene Clark demonstrated solidarity of thought, saying that homosexuality “”is a disorder, and as a disorder, should prevent a person from being ordained a priest.”” These words came from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the seat of the Archbishop of New York.

Unfortunately, it is still the tendency of a staggering majority of cultures to associate homosexuality with sexual deviance. It is not a deviant behavior, nor merely a “”lifestyle.”” Even the Catechism of the Catholic Church concedes that people “”do not choose their homosexual condition”” and that “”they must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity.”” Yet, it is still easy for unthinking people to make the irrational assumption that one “”deviance”” is like another, collapsing true disorders — such as pedophilia and sexual abuse — into sexual orientation.

The clergy’s knee-jerk blame of homosexuals for pedophilia also obfuscates a pressing point in the abuse dialogue: that a substantial corpus of priests’ victims has been girls and women. The media tends to recount examples of homosexual abuse most prominently; they make for sensational headlines.

Yet according to a Jan. 9 report in a Salon.com article, “”attorneys and survivor networks estimate that from one-third to over a half of all victims of sexually abusive priests are women.”” By making the scandal into a “”homosexual”” issue, the priesthood and the media have drowned out the voices of abused females, and that only guarantees that the scars of abuse will linger all the longer among Catholics.

In essence, the problem is not one of homosexuality but of fidelity. A man who has taken a vow of chastity as part of his admission to the priesthood should never violate that vow, whether with a woman or another man. And nobody of any sexual persuasion must be allowed to prey with impunity upon children in his charge.

These things may seem obvious. They have not proven themselves obvious, however, to the clergy who make comments deprecating homosexuals, or who scramble to assist in the cover-up as sexual abuse spirals out of control within the ranks of the Catholic clergy.

As the Vatican decides its official stance on homosexuality in the priesthood, it might do well to make a broader adaptation of a document produced in 1999 by a committee of the Catholic German Bishops’ Conference. It contains recommendations for German bishops on admitting homosexuals to the seminary. Among the things to be examined are whether the candidate “”possesses the stability to handle the burdens and temptations that can be expected,”” “”can keep the intimate sphere of his sexuality separate from his ministerial activity”” and whether he “”can ensure convincingly that he has lived a chaste life.””

The only thing that ought to be changed is to delete all references to “”homosexuals”” in the document, making these standards the basis for evaluating any man of any orientation seeking the priesthood.

If the Vatican should choose to bar known homosexuals explicitly from the priesthood, it will only compound problems for the Catholic laity in several ways.

First, with an estimated 10 to 30 percent of seminarians identifying as homosexual, an already understaffed clergy cannot afford to lose men who are willing to commit to chastity and serve their god, regardless of their sexual orientation. In the end, the laity suffers again — first as victims of abuse, and then their churches are closed and programs are cut due to a lack of priests.

Second, an attack on homosexual priests will deepen fissures between gay Catholics and the church. Gay Catholics already feel a large degree of isolation from an establishment that purports to accept them, yet won’t accept whom they love.

With a ban on gay priests, the Vatican will have demonstrated that it is not addressing the problem at the root of the abuse scandals — the need to find committed candidates for the priesthood who will respect the vows they have made to their god — but that it desires to find an easy scapegoat.

There will be little progress unless the public and the Vatican learn to accept gays and lesbians as whole persons with a healthy and God-given sexuality. Pointing the finger at homosexuals for the abuse scandals sets this goal back decades, if not centuries.