Yesterday, LGBT News Italia published an interview with the former Vatican official Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, who made a public announcement that he is gay and partnered last October, and who was then removed from his position in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Here are some excerpts:
Interviewer Andrea Miluzzo asks Msgr. Charamsa why he chose to come out in the public way that he did. He responds:
[M]y public coming out has been the final goal and the reaction to my experience of fear and homophobic hate imposed by my Church. Today the Church is one of the most powerful agencies of irrational hate towards sexual minorities, refusing any possibility of verification and discussion of its retrograde position, which has nothing to do with reality and with the state of modern science as regards homosexuality. The Church is stubbornly entrenched in its false position, and is not willing to inform itself of scientific progress that have been made in the last decades. Facing this ideology of catholic Church current propaganda (immoral and irresponsible, because false) has brought me to the act of release and denouncement associated with my coming out. I couldn't in any other way tell the institution of my church to wake itself, to begin to inform itself and to stop offending the dignity of people not belonging to the heterosexual majority.
The accumulation of straws, which you mentioned before, is an appropriate image: there have been very many straws gradually weighing on my life and my faith, on my mind and my heart. The offenses, the mockeries, the disdain for homosexual people, the lack of humanity and sensitivity towards them, the falsehood, the lies and accusations (such as: "All of the homosexuals, or the majority of them, are pedophiles"), the teachings full of stereotypes and false images, the paranoid narrow mind by ignorant people who, on behalf of the Church, dare to impose their ignorance as authoritarian positions on millions of homosexual people's lives.
And then:
It’s a mindset which the institution of the Church shapes every day, inciting fear, disdain and in the end hatred of homosexuals, just like a straw after another one. All they need to do is instill in people's mind this image of homosexuals as inferior beings to deplore, to feel sorry for and finally to hate, to eliminate, to leave outside the law, like miserable people who aren't able to love and have no right to have their own family or their own children. That is the daily work of my Church, not only in the Vatican and in Italy. We know its results very well, in our societies which are permeated with homophobia. The more catholic a society, the greater the homophobia. Straw after straw: the perfect work of the catholic Church, that has created its own imaginary enemies.
"The perfect work of the catholic Church, that has created its own imaginary enemies"; and, "Today the Church is one of the most powerful agencies of irrational hate towards sexual minorities": this is powerful testimony from someone who formerly worked on the "inside," within the doctrinal watchdog office of the Vatican from which so much of the hatred, enmity, outright lies about LGBT people emanates. As Msgr. Charamsa says, while these outright lies attended by hatred and enmity towards LGBT human beings are issued as Catholic moral teaching, what contemporary science has to tell us about sexual orientation and gender issues is light years removed from what Catholic leaders want to believe and to say, so that the teaching of the church becomes ever more irrelevant to increasing numbers of people who do not inhabit the precious, closed off, gnostic world inhabited by Catholic pastoral leaders. And that spells trouble for the church and its future.
The translation of this article was done by Flavia Viglione.
The photo of Msgr. Charamsa and his partner Eduardo Planas is from the LGBT News Italia article.