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.