44-year-old Krzysztof Charamsa, a former senior Vatican priest who was defrocked and fired the day after he came out, has blasted The Catholic Church in an open — and openly furious — letter to Pope Francis.
In the letter, he claims the Church makes the lives of millions of gay Catholics “a hell,” and says the clergy is “full of homosexuals.”
He accuses the church of “persecuting” gay Catholics and causing “immeasurable suffering” to them and their families.
Charamsa claims that after “a long and tormented period of discernment and prayer,” he decided to “publicly reject the violence of the Church towards homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and intersexual people”.
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He also says the Roman Catholic clergy is often “frequently violently homophobic,” and implores “all gay cardinals, gay bishops and gay priests [to] have the courage to abandon this insensitive, unfair and brutal Church.”
He claims he can no longer be silent about the “homophobic hate of the Church, the exclusion, the marginalization and the stigmatization of people like me”, whose “human rights are denied” by the Church.
Later, Charamsa writes that Pope Bendict’s proclamation that homosexuality was “a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil” was, in itself, “diabolical.”
LGBTQ Catholics, he says, have a right to a happy family life “even if the Church doesn’t want to bless it.”
Pope Francis has yet to respond to the letter.
h/t: BBC
