Skip to main content

GAY and the Vatican

Krzysztof Charamsa, who was fired by the Vatican last month after he publicly announced his homosexuality says he has no regrets and is planning a book about his experience. The 43-year-old Polish priest also revealed he had a Spanish boyfriend.


     "I now feel better gay and more of a priest than before," he told AFP at a hotel in the heart of Barcelona, where he now lives in the gay district.



He said he felt "liberated" and "at peace", but still had a lot to say about the Church, which he accuses of persecuting homosexuals.



     "It's not like the Islamic State (group) that hounds homosexuals by killing them. The Catholic Church doesn't actually kill people, but it kills them psychologically," he said. It kills them with its backward stance, with its reject, contempt and constant preaching against homosexuals."



Charamsa detailed his "New manifesto for gay liberation", which he plans to hand over to the Vatican in the hope of changing the Church's stance on homosexuality.



"A form of new Ten Commandments to apply in this field", it asks the Vatican to discard Church documents that are hostile towards homosexuals, such as Benedict XVI's 2005 edict banning bishops from ordaining homosexuals into the priesthood.



As such, the manifesto calls on the Vatican to allow gays to become priests, and also to revise its interpretation of Biblical texts on this issue.



The manifesto also suggests kick-starting dialogue with Evangelists and Anglicans, whom Charamsa says are more open on gay rights, and asks for apologies from the Vatican "for its omissions and silences, persecutions and crimes against homosexuals throughout the centuries."



The now unemployed theology professor hopes to be able to start teaching again at university and write a book about his experience as a homosexual in the Vatican. He would like all homosexual priests to come out of the closet "to show the Vatican that we exist and that we are good priest

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...