VATICAN CITY -- A Vatican document expected to be made public soon stops short of a sweeping ban on homosexuals entering the priesthood, allowing those who have lived chastely for three years to be candidates for the clergy, a senior Vatican official said yesterday.

The document, in the works for at least three years, updates Vatican policy, which had held that gays or men with homosexual tendencies should not be ordained, regardless of whether they can remain celibate.

The new document permits candidates who have lived a chaste life for at least three years before their admission to a seminary, said the senior official, who requested anonymity because the document has not yet been released.

The official confirmed a report in leading Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Friday listing the reasons for not admitting gay candidates, which include men who publicly show their homosexuality and those who reveal an attraction to what the document described as the gay lifestyle.

The report, by the newspaper's chief Vatican correspondent, Luigi Accattoli, cited sources speaking to him about the document from the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education.

The Italian weekly Panorama said in its editions yesterday that Pope Benedict XVI approved the document during the summer.

In a similar report yesterday, the National Catholic Reporter said seminary officials will be asked to exercise "prudential judgment."

One Vatican official said the document would be published very soon, but he refused to discuss the contents.

The senior official said, "Anyone who knows Catholic teaching should not be surprised by what the document says."

A key document from 1961, an "Instruction on the Careful Selection and Training of Candidates for the States of Perfection and Sacred Orders," made clear that homosexuals should be barred from the priesthood.

Vatican teaching holds that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered." The church, however, says homosexuals should be treated with compassion and dignity.

The senior official said there was a lot of "ambiguity" about the term "homosexual" and therefore much depends on the individual in question, making it difficult to come up with an "absolute, sweeping policy."

The issue has long been a subject of debate at the Vatican. It received renewed attention after the U.S. church sex-abuse scandal that erupted in 2002.

In the United States, where the gay priests issue is hotly contested, reactions were couched in speculative terms because there have been so many conflicting rumors about the document.

But a homosexual priest, speaking on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisal from church leaders, said if the reports are true "it will be the first time that the church will have formally said that gay men have been and can be accepted by seminaries."

Dean Hoge, a Catholic University of America sociologist who studies the priesthood, saw "good news" for seminary rectors because, as reported, the document "is not too far from present policy" and "an outright ban is not possible. There is no way of enforcing it."