Bishop resigns after gay sex tape leak
A Romanian Orthodox bishop has resigned after a tape of him allegedly having gay sex.
Corneliu Barladeanu, the Bishop of Huși, was rocked by scandal this month over the shocking tape, which showed him having gay sex.
The Bishop was an influential voice within the ultra-conservative church, which is strongly opposed to LGBT rights and lobbied against the 2001 repeal of a law that criminalised homosexuality.
But Barladeanu was left with his reputation in tatters when the tape leaked online.
A blurry video, which has racked up more than 180,000 views, shows two male figures kissing and performing oral sex acts on eachother.
According to reports, the figures are Barladeanu and a student at his seminary.
Despite protesting his innocence and claiming the tape had been tampered with, he was dismissed from his post as a Bishop this month.
A statement from the church’s leadership said the decision was made “for the peace and the good of the Church.
The Holy Synod had convened an emergency session to discuss how to deal with the scandal.
Barladeanu will remain within the church as a monk, according to officials, but will hold no official Church position.
It is the second such scandal within the Church in just weeks, after a priest was also expelled due to a sex scandal.
According to AFP, the church said “all believers…should respect the discipline of the Church and permanently renew their spiritual lives”.
The Church also insisted the bishop would have been treated similarly if the other person on the tape had been a woman.
When not grappling with gay sex scandals, the Romanian Orthodox has taken a leading role in trying to reinforce a ban on same-sex marriage.
The church previously gave its backing to a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman.
The church gathered more than three million signatures in support of an amendment on the issue.
The Patriarch said the people “must support the Church’s effort to protect the natural, traditional and universal family, and resist some new family models that consider the natural woman-man union only one model among others”.
Meanwhile, the former Communist country continues to liberalise.
In the past two decades, it fully decriminalised homosexuality, introduced and enforced wide-ranging anti-discrimination laws, equalised the age of consent and introduced laws against homophobic hate crimes.
