BOSTON (AP) – A former Boston priest says the church must improve its screening process for accepting seminarians to keep homosexuals from being ordained into the priesthood.

“We must be very careful of who we accept in the seminary and who we ordain as priests,” Bishop John M. D’arcy, now of the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese in Indiana, said Sunday. “It’s time to ordain men of quality, not to just look for numbers.”

D’arcy, who was in Boston to attend Mass at Our Lady of the Presentation Church, the Brighton neighborhood parish where he grew up, said he hopes the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops will discuss screening policies for the seminary when it meets this fall, and will take a firm stance against homosexual men serving as priests.

The Rev. Christopher J. Coyne, spokesman for the Boston archdiocese, said that while there has been some discussion among members of the archdiocese and the Vatican about the possibility of banning homosexuals from the priesthood, no decisions have been made.

“The main issue is celibacy,” Coyne said, adding that D’arcy’s concerns about gay priests are not necessarily shared by others.

Coyne said that only 20 percent of the applicants for priesthood in the Archdiocese of Boston are accepted by the church.

“I don’t see the need here in Boston,” he said of a possible overhaul of the screening process. “I can say the process in Boston is a good one.”

In an interview with The Boston Globe after the morning Mass, D’arcy said that while only hetrosexual men should be allowed to become priests, they must embrace celibacy.

D’arcy, who in private letters to other church officials as early as 1978 questioned the reassignment of priests accused of sexual misconduct, said that to put a gay man in the mostly male environment of the priesthood is unfair.

“We don’t put these (hetrosexual) men in with attractive women,” he said, referring to seminarians. “You’re putting him in with men. It’s not fair to him, it’s not fair to them, it’s not fair to the church.”

D’arcy said priests with the right temperament for the job will attract more good men to work for the church.

“If we ordain men with pathologies and difficulties, they will draw the same kind,” he said. “Don’t just pray for priests, pray for priests of good quality.”

AP-ES-07-19-04 0642EDT