In a brave and critical resignation letter, the priest accused the Church of making the lives of millions of gay Catholics globally “a hell”
On October 3, Krzysztof Charamsa held a news conference in a restaurant in Italy to announce that he was gay and in a relationship with a man.
At the time he held a senior post at the Vatican at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
He was immediately forced to resign.
The Holy See said Charamsa’s decision to make his announcement on the eve of the Vatican’s synod on the family was “irresponsible, since it aims to subject the synod assembly to undue media pressure”.
On the same day, Charamsa wrote a resignation letter to Pope Francis. He released a copy of the letter to the BBC.
In the letter he accuses the Church of making the lives of millions of gay Catholics globally “a hell”.
He claims that while the Roman Catholic clergy is “full of homosexuals”, it is also “frequently violently homophobic”.
He urges “all gay cardinals, gay bishops and gay priests [to] have the courage to abandon this insensitive, unfair and brutal Church” and urges the Church to annul a decision taken by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, to sign a document in 2005 that forbid men with deep-rooted homosexual tendencies from becoming priests.
He says he can no longer bear 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.
He says that after a “long and tormented period of discernment and prayer”, he had taken the decision to “publicly reject the violence of the Church towards homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and intersexual people”.
He says that LGBT Catholics have a right to family life, “even if the Church does not want to bless it”.
He later criticises the Vatican for putting pressure on states which have legalised equal or same-sex marriage.
He says in the letter that he is worried about how this news will impact his deeply religious mother.
The priest also thanked Pope Francis, who is thought to have a kinder attitude towards homosexuality than some of his predecessors.
Pope Francis is yet to respond.
© 2015 GCN (Gay Community News). All rights reserved.
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