Screening The Priests

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The mostly secular tools employed by seminary screeners may be familiar to anyone who has experienced a basic psychological test at a large company. Plante uses the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test, geared to screening for psychopathologies; a Myers-Briggs-like self-image quiz for characteristics such as introversion or dominance; and a sentence-completion exercise featuring such opening statements as "If I had all the money in the world, I would ..." or "After they had sex, he felt ..." Armed with the results, Plante later sits down for 60 to 90 minutes with the candidate, "specifically looking," he says, "to see if they can handle the vows of religious life."

To that end, he and fellow screeners hope for high scores on empathy and intelligence (one recommends a minimum IQ of 110). They are worried that a predisposition toward solitude, though fine for monks, may bode ill in pastoral settings. They red-flag callings that seem to have been rebound responses to romantic breakups or other traumas and look for unrealistic job expectations (one of Plante's candidates modeled himself after Mother Teresa, down to the year he expected to accept his Nobel Prize). They are especially vigilant for histories of sexual abuse combined with low impulse control regarding alcohol, gambling, sex or anger. Many screeners think the combination may put the candidate at risk of becoming an abuser.

Until now they reported on homosexuality not as an intrinsic evil but as a simple data point while addressing a candidate's psychosexual maturity. A few seminaries nonetheless regard the information as crucial. When a psychologist reports a candidate's describing his prior dating life as "'I didn't go with a girl, I went with a guy for three years,' that's usually a game stopper," says Monsignor Steven Rohlfs, rector at Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmetsburg, Md. But most in his position are more accepting. Plante reports that one West Coast diocese responded to rumors of Rome's new hard line by asking him to keep homosexual designation out of his final reports, for fear it would hurt gay priests' careers down the line.

That suited Plante, who is comfortable with the 20% to 40% of the priesthood he believes are homosexually oriented. He notes that while Catholic teaching calls homosexuality a disorder, the American Psychiatric Association dropped that descriptive decades ago. "Being gay in and of itself, I would hope, wouldn't prevent someone from becoming a priest," he says. All four church-contracted psychologists interviewed by TIME agreed vociferously with his contention that homosexuality doesn't make one more likely to sexually abuse children. For instance, Father Gerard McGlone, a Jesuit psychologist and a vice president of Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, believes some tightening of the admission process is appropriate: "I think to a certain extent the Vatican is correct in trying to weed out unhealthy expressions of the homosexual experience." But he is also worried that tougher guidelines might backfire by encouraging gay or sexually confused priests to deceive themselves about their own orientation, which could lead to a subsequent crisis and pathology.