Gay Catholic priest doesn’t regret coming out… even though he got sacked for it
A senior Vatican priest who came out as gay says he doesn’t regret the decision – even though he was thrown out of the Catholic Church because of it.
Last 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 – but the Vatican claimed the decision to come out was “irresponsible”, dismissing the priest from his post.
This week, the priest – who has warned the Pope his Church’s policies are “making life hell” for LGBT people – said he did not regret coming out, even though it cost him his job.
He told the Times: “I have not lost my faith… the Church has left me but I have not left it. I suppose I am a priest looking for a job.”
He told Yahoo: “I now feel better gay and more of a priest than before,”
“As long as [the Church] does not openly reject and condemn this criminalisation, it is an accomplice of anti-homosexual terror.
“It’s not like the Islamic State that hounds homosexuals by killing them. The Catholic Church doesn’t actually kill people, but it kills them psychologically.
“It kills them with its backward stance, with its reject, contempt and constant preaching against homosexuals.”
“It’s like saying Earth is flat and still. They are closer to the stances of Islamic fundamentalism than to reason.”
The priest recently 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, and urging Slovakians to vote against equal marriage, which he claims “disfigures God’s creation”.
