Gay priest tells Pope: Your church is making life hell for gay people
A Vatican priest who was sacked after coming out for gay has shared the message he sent challenging the Pope on LGBT rights.
At the start of the month, the Church’s three-week long annual Synod was disrupted when an official in the Vatican’s doctrine office came out as gay – and was promptly dismissed from his post.
In interviews, Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa said he was happy and proud to be a gay priest, and was in love with a man named Eduardo, whom he identified as his boyfriend.
The Vatican claimed the decision to come out was “irresponsible”, dismissing the priest from his post.
The priest has this week published the letter he personally sent to the Pope when he came out as gay.
In it, he called on the Pontiff to reform the church, saying he could no longer cope with the “homophobic hate of the Church, the exclusion, the marginalisation and the stigmatisation of people like me [whose] human rights are denied” by the Church.
The priest added that following a “long and tormented period of discernment and prayer”, he had opted to “publicly reject the violence of the Church towards homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and intersexual people”.
Claiming the Church is “frequently violently homophobic” and is “making life hell” for LGBT people, he urged for “all gay cardinals, gay bishops and gay priests [to] have the courage to abandon this insensitive, unfair and brutal Church”.
The Pope is yet to reply to the letter.
Despite an early ‘who am I to judge’ PR blitz attempting to bolster his image, the Pope is yet to lift any of the actively homophobic and transphobic policies of his predecessors.
Proposals to ‘reach out’ to gay people were scrapped by the Church last year – and despite suggestions that the plans would return at a 2015 Synod, they were passed over again this year.
The Pope has also increasingly rallied against same-sex marriage, inviting representatives from listed hate groups to a ‘traditional marriage’ conference, urging Slovakians to vote against equal marriage, which he claims “disfigures God’s creation”.
