A Polish priest who was recently stripped of his post by the Vatican, after announcing that he’s in a gay relationship, has harshly criticized the Vatican and Roman Catholics worldwide for their treatment of gay Catholics. Our Religious Affairs Correspondent, Caroline Wyatt, met him in Barcelona – and asked him how he was feeling after sending the letter.
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In the letter, written in Italian and obtained by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Father Charamsa, who has a Catalan boyfriend, said that as a baptised Catholic, a priest and a theologian, he had wanted to serve the Church his whole life.
“I think Pope Francis has also a conviction that he has opposition so great that this is not for this moment”, he says.
If Charamsa’s hope was to force the church to take bold action on its approach to gay and lesbian people, then the attempt was unsuccessful.
In his native Poland, Charamsa says the church was seen as a haven from communism, and a place where “freedom is possible”. I am a healthy homosexual man. I am not a monster.
Pope Francis. The church is “locked, in a paranoid position against the pope”, Charamsa says.
The Polish priest terms “diabolical” Pope Benedict’s statement that homosexuality was “a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil”.
The Vatican had not issued a public response to the criticism at the time this article was published. When an annual meeting of Catholic bishops concluded at the Vatican on Sunday, the church finally inched closer toward accepting a community it has long neglected: divorcees.
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“As a man of homosexual orientation myself, I can no longer bear the homophobic hate of the Church, the exclusion, the marginalisation and the stigmatisation of people like me – continually offended in their dignity and with their human rights denied and defeated by this violent Church and its people”. But it restated that there was “no basis for any comparison, however remote, between homosexual unions and God’s design for marriage and the family”. The views expressed therein are not necessarily those of bvinews.com, its sponsors or advertisers.
