"gay culture". While the preparation for this document had started 10 years before its publication, this instruction has been seen as an official answer by the Catholic Church to several sex scandals involving priests in the late 20th/early 21st century, including the American Roman Catholic sex abuse cases and a 2004 sex scandal in a seminary at St. Pölten (Austria). Two months before his death in 2005, Pope John Paul II, troubled by the sex scandals in the US, Austria, and Ireland, had written to the Congregation for Catholic Education: "Right from the moment young men enter a Seminary their ability to live a life of celibacy should be monitored so that before their ordination one should be morally certain of their sexual and emotional maturity." The document has attracted criticism based on an interpretation that the document implies that homosexuality is associated with pedophilia or with sexual abuse more generally. There have been some questions on how distinctions between deep-seated and transient homosexuality, as proposed by the document, would be applied in practice: the actual distinction that is made might be between those who abuse and those who do not. Implementation The Belgian college of bishops elaborated that the sexual restrictions for seminary and priesthood candidates apply equally to men of all sexual orientations. The Vatican followed up in 2008 with a directive to implement psychological screening for candidates for the priesthood. Conditions listed for exclusion from the priesthood include "uncertain sexual identity" and "deep-seated homosexual tendencies". Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York has been quoted as saying that the Vatican's directive was not tout court a "no-gays" policy. Opposition to gay clergy Over recent years Catholics on the religious right have tried to connect the incidence of homosexuality within the priesthood to the sexual abuse scandal facing the Church arguing that the direct root "was not abuse of power, or pedophilia, or clericalism, or the distortive psychological effects of celibacy and institutional homophobia, but gayness itself." Cardinal Raymond Burke has called for the Church to be "purified" of its "homosexual culture". Bishop Robert Morlino of Wisconsin has suggested a "homosexual subculture" was wreaking devastation and the Church therefore needed to show "more hatred of homosexual sexual behavior". Michael Hichborn of the Lepanto Institute has suggested removing all gay clergy from the church, even though this might cause a shortage of priests. Estimating numbers Historical incidence of homosexual clergy