I’m currently reading Martel’s “In the Closet of the Vatican”. I was initially wary, suspicious that it could simply fuel a backlash from the orthotoxic Catholics, and would be too much mere sensationalism. I was wrong. This is much, much more than a mere exposé of Vatican gay clergy. It is absolutely riveting, deserving a careful read by all concerned about the Catholic Church.
So, the other shoe has finally dropped. The veil has been removed from what the French rather gloriously call a secret de Polichinelle ― an open secret: one that “everybody knows” but for which the evidence is both elusive and never really sought. The merely anecdotal is, at last, acquiring the contours of sociological visibility.
The structure of the clerical closet
Frédéric Martel’s book In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality and Hypocrisy is the first attempt of which I am aware at a properly researched answer to the question: “How and why is it that the principal institutional obstacle to LGBT rights at the worldwide level appears itself to be massively staffed by gay men?”
James is a personal friend whom I trust. His assessment, based on his own experience as an interviewee for the book, and on his own extensive knowledge of the subject, convinced him that this is a serious attempt at dispassionate, accurate journalism: note his statement of the question: “How and why is it that the principal institutional obstacle to LGBT rights at the worldwide level appears itself to be massively staffed by gay men?”.
James does not need to be told that the Vatican is massively staffed by gay men: he knows that well. What is more important, is the “how and why”, which has not previously been fully addressed. Numerous previous observers have noted the high proportion of gay men in the priesthood, with some attempts at explanation. What I have not previously found, is why that proportion should apparently be even higher at the upper echelons of the Catholic hierarchy. (Krzystzof Charamsa has written about this specifically for the CDF, from his own insider knowledge, but Oliva goes much beyond that one dicastery).
This not just about outing people. Rather, it’s a solid sociological analysis of why there are so many gay clergy in the priesthood. it’s also a riveting historical account of how a previously extensive but deeply closeted homophile Vatican culture, morphed into a more visible homosexual, sometimes even internally gay, environment – but still deeply closeted externally. These contradictions give rise to the prevalence of publicly virulent homophobia, from men whose personal lives are deeply hypocritical.
One of the criticisms that I have seen of the book is its timing, on the eve of the meeting on child abuse, which has nothing to do with homosexuality. I disagree – Martel’s analysis shows how closeted Vatican homophobia, contributed to the abuse crisis. Indeed, it’s been fascinating reading this book in parallel with reports from the Vatican meeting on the protection of minors. When I first started writing about LGBT Catholics nearly ten years ago, I wrote extensively for a time about the issue of clerical sexual abuse. Later, I wrote a great deal also about gay priests and their particular difficulties. Ten years on, I am left with a deep sense of how far the Catholic church has moved on matters of sexuality during that period – and how far it has yet to go.
“Since Jesus had table fellowship with social outcasts and sinners, those rejected by the religious establishment of his time, I consider myself to have been most fully a Jesuit, a ‘companion of Jesus,’ when I came out publicly as a gay man, one of the social rejects of my time. It was only by our coming out that society’s negative stereotypes would be overcome and we would gain social acceptance.”
-Fr Robert Carter
There is no contradiction between being Catholic and gay or lesbian. Indeed, just as Robert Carter says he was most fully a Jesuit when he cane out publicly, so for many of us, we are most fully Catholic when we too come out in Church. (I say deliberately “for many of us”, as coming out is always a deeply personal decision, which may not always be appropriate for all.)
Robert Carter, Priest and Gay Activist, Dies at 82
Robert Carter, right, with Dan McCarthy, left, Bernard Lynch and John McNeill at a gay pride march in the early 1980s”
The Rev. Robert Carter, who in the early 1970s was one of the first Roman Catholic priests in the country to declare publicly that he was gay and who helped found the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, died on Feb. 22 in the Bronx. He was 82.
His death, at a Jesuit health care facility, was confirmed by the Rev. Thomas R. Slon, executive assistant to the provincial of the New York Province of the Society of Jesus.
Father Carter’s coming out was a very public one. In October 1973, Dr. Howard J. Brown, a former New York City health services administrator, announced that he was gay and that he was forming a civil rights organization for homosexual men and women. Then called the National Gay Task Force, it later became the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
An article about the group in The New York Times said: “A number of homosexual and lesbian organizations were represented on the board. One member was the Rev. Robert Carter, a Jesuit priest and professor of historical theology.”
Soon afterward he was visited by a subprovincial of the Jesuit order. “It seems that they were afraid I had had a psychotic break or something,” Father Carter wrote in an unpublished memoir.
Although there were calls for his expulsion by irate “Jesuits, parents and alumni of our schools,” Father Carter continued, he was not disciplined. In those days, the church and the Jesuit order were somewhat more accepting of gay people.
The church continues to hold that while homosexual attraction is “disordered,” gay people who are celibate are not inherently sinful. In 2005, however, the Vatican issued a document saying the church would not admit to a seminary or ordain “those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture.’ ”
Father Carter helped found the New York chapter of DignityUSA, a support group for gay Catholics. In 1972, with the Rev. John McNeill, he hosted the first meeting of the chapter at the Jesuit chapel on West 98th Street in Manhattan.
“I refer to him as the heart of Dignity,” Father McNeill, the author of “The Church and the Homosexual” (Beacon, 1976), said in an interview. “I was doing all the writing, but he was on the front line, meeting with people, counseling people.”
When the Catholic authorities said Dignity could not meet on church property, Father Carter celebrated Mass in apartments all around Manhattan. He led blessing ceremonies for gay couples. He testified in support of the gay rights law proposed by Mayor Edward I. Koch before it was passed by the City Council in 1986. He urged Dignity to march in gay pride parades and marched himself, in his clerical collar.
Although he was a classics scholar, he was also a trained social worker who counseled gay priests and hundreds of lay Catholics. “As I sought to reconcile being gay and Catholic,” Brendan Fay, a longtime gay rights activist, said in an interview, “Bob Carter helped me move from self-hate to self-acceptance and then to a place of gay activism. He was like a Catholic Harvey Milk.”
Robert Earl Carter was born in Chicago on July 27, 1927, the son of Earl and Ila Grace Smith Carter. His father managed several music stores. He is survived by his sister, Nancy Glader of Prospect Heights, Ill.
Father Carter’s parents were Protestants who worshiped in a series of denominations as he grew up. Then, at the University of Chicago, he read James Joyce’s semiautobiographical “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” It introduced him, he wrote, to “the centrality of Catholicism in the history of Western civilization.”
He graduated in June 1946 and the next day was received into the Catholic Church. Three years later, he completed a master’s degree in Greek studies at his alma mater, and in 1953 he received his doctorate there. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1954 and was ordained in 1963.
Father Carter went on to earn a master’s degree in social work from Columbia in 1981. By 1985 he was counseling AIDS patients at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx; he later became a supervisor of the outpatient AIDS program at the Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan.
For him, there was no contradiction between homosexuality and Christianity.
In his memoir, Father Carter wrote: “Since Jesus had table fellowship with social outcasts and sinners, those rejected by the religious establishment of his time, I consider myself to have been most fully a Jesuit, a ‘companion of Jesus,’ when I came out publicly as a gay man, one of the social rejects of my time. It was only by our coming out that society’s negative stereotypes would be overcome and we would gain social acceptance.”
It is always worth paying close attention to press interviews with Msgr Krysztof Charamsa, the Catholic theologian at the CDF who came out as both gay and partnered, on the eve of the 2015 Synod on /marriage and family. There have been several of these, initially on the occasion of his coming out, and later with the launch of his book, in the original Italian and the later translations. Sadly, as far as I am aware, none of these have yet appeared in English.
I therefore provide below, my own free translation (based on a modified Google translation), of his most recent (German) interview with Berliner Zeitung. In this post, I present the interview in full, without comment. My responses will follow, in a series of follow-up posts.
Openly gay Msgr Krysztof Charamsa (left), with partner
Ex-Monsignore Krzysztof Charamsa “Gott liebt mich, weil ich meinen Mann liebe”
(Translation: “God loves me, because I love my husband”)
We meet in the breakfast room of a small hotel at Hamburg main station. Krzysztof Charamsa, 44, has presented his book here. He wears a light, waisted jacket, with a blue handkerchief, if I remember correctly. A white shirt. Blue jeans. He looks very elegant. The most striking however is orange glasses. Krzysztof Charamsa laughs and loves to cry. I had not imagined the Grand Inquisitor of the Catholic Church so. Not even one of his staff. Krzysztof Charamsa is a Pole, but speaks German. Very rarely does he search for a word.
What is Spinning?
This is my sport: cycling in the gym. At the bottom I am struggling, everything is going through my head. I can think clearly.
One does not step forward. This is your favourite sport?
It is like liberation. You kick wildly into the pedals. They sweat. You are exhausted. But you do not have to worry about anything. Your head is free. It hits the spot.
That’s why you wrote a book about the “immutability of God”.
My dissertation. At that time I did not know Spinning. I was looking for security, for a solid foundation. It seemed to me to offer me a God who is self-sufficient. This was a God who does not lean toward his creature. No God of friendship, no God in the world, in history. A very sad image of God, I find today. I’ve been thinking about why we’re going to suffer during my studies. Where we have a gracious God. That was my determining question. I have no answer. But today I think it was my homosexuality, my suffering for it, which made suffering such a big subject. I did not know anything about the pleasures of love, nor of gay love.
When masturbating did you have homosexual fantasies?
Yes.
That was not nice?
I was anxious. I spent my puberty in communist Poland, in the Catholic Church. Both hyper-homophobic facilities! With whom could I have spoken? How? I had no words for it. I had feelings of guilt. I would have had them, even if I had been heterosexual. But my gay fantasies increased my insecurity.
You were ten, eleven years in Hamburg. You must have seen homosexuals at least at the Hauptbahnhof.
I did not see them. Because I could not see them. In the world I lived in, there were no homosexuals. People just did not talk about them. They did not exist. As one says in Chechnya today: homosexuals can not be suppressed, because they do not exist. This is the way the Catholic Church behaved.
How many homosexuals are there in the Catholic Church?
Nobody can tell you. There are no surveys. I can only g. Based guess. Based on my experience. I was in priestly seminaries, I taught. I have always lived among priests. I was not a monk who lived in a single monastery. I believe that, cautiously estimated, fifty percent of the Catholic clergy is homosexual.
The total population is assumed to be 10%.
The priesthood is a fantastic space to conceal homosexuality when it is not socially accepted. For this reason the priestly life attracts many homosexuals. It does not matter that you are not interested in women. One is always in male company.
A homophobic organization of homosexuals
This is the dilemma of the Church. Hence much of the suffering and despair of the priests. Homosexuals are persecuted and at the same time homosexuality is celebrated. Aesthetic. Pope Benedict XVI has greatly aggravated the hatred of homosexuals. At the same time, however, under his pontificate, it was as gay as never before in the modern age: the red shoes, the peaks, tassels, and fringes that were on display everywhere. “Soon we will all have to wear lace underwear,” one of the papal ceremonial masters complained. See for yourself on Youtube how Ratzinger and other dignitaries of the Vatican look at the naked torsos of the brother Pellegrini! That same Ratzinger writes that homosexuals can not love. They have, he says, only this morbid desire.
Perhaps the Ratzinger’s own – deep-rooted – life experience … He is doomed to non-love.
That I do not know. But I do know that is precisely the situation in which many thousands of priests find themselves. The situation I was in, it took very long before I realized: it is not homosexuality that is sinful, but the church. Many, many homosexual priests are very good priests.
You were a member of the Congregation for the Congregation for twelve years. You persecuted the devil on behalf of the church. Then, on October 3, 2015, you publicly declared to the world : I, Krzysztof Charamsa, Catholic priest and member of the Congregation of the Faith, am gay, and this is my partner, Eduard Planas, whom I love. You changed from Saul to Paul.
I inherited the place, which became free, when Georg Gänswein became Ratzinger’s private secretary. I inherited his computer, his office, his chair. Paul followed the truth. When he persecuted the Christians, he believed that he had to do so for the sake of the truth. Then he recognized his error and became a Christian. I thought God was against my homosexuality, so I fought it. Then I discovered that God had nothing against my homosexuality. He had given something against which my love was strugling. I was an official of a truth office, a Stasi. I was perfect in this office. I put together, for every question, the views that the Church had represented over the centuries. The new knowledge of science did not matter. The church was in possession of the truth. This treasure was to be lifted. I did not do that as a cynic. I did it because I believed in it.
This was the purpose from one minute to the next.
I had nothing but a suitcase and my husband. That was a liberation. And peace. The first time: peace. A new security. I am a believing man, so I know: That was a gift from God.
You always have to get everything from the top!
Yes, yes. Of course I also have to develop energy and strength. But they also come from God. Life needs a foundation. If you have that, you can let go. This was the experience of Paul. This was also my experience. But it took me a long time to realize that the ecclesiastical texts against homosexuality speak about me. In the Catechism, for example, it says of homosexual relations: “They violate the natural law, for the transmission of life is excluded in sexual act. They do not arise from a true affective and sexual supplementary need. They are in no way to be approved.” Today I know that the catechism preaches homophobia and not the love of God. That’s why I introduced my partner at my coming out. This was a theological statement. I wanted to make it clear: I’m not looking for sex. I’m looking for love. Sex I can have anywhere. For me, it’s about love. Homosexual love.
Is the doctrine that the Father has the Son nailed to the cross in order to save mankind, not unloving?
The suffering, the self-sacrificing God – that is the mystery of religion.
This God, who always kills whole tribes of nations, would not you weep for the dead of Sodom and Gomorrah?
It is impossible to understand how God can allow this. But I believe it is his respect for human freedom. His respect for our freedom. It is the limit of the action of God.
But the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah did not perish because they were fighting each other. God eradicated them.
In the Old Testament there is this image of God. Jesus corrects this. The relationship between God, suffering and freedom is the greatest question of religion. That is their secret. I took the liberty to first acknowledge my homosexuality before God. He accepted me. When I did it before the church, she rejected me.
Sodom and Gomorrah?
When you read the text in the Old Testament, it was not about homosexuality – the later tradition shifted the emphasis to the sexual – but about xenophobia and the refusal of hospitality. Lot receives the strangers, in truth God’s angels, with friendship and is attacked by his fellow citizens. It is – in this the story is quite topical – about the correct handling of refugees and migrants. The Sodom of today is my home country Poland. No one is willing to accept refugees. There is no place for a Syrian family in all Poland. Poland is Catholic, but no one opens strangers to his house. This is just one example of the terrible confusion in the Catholic Church.
Last night (Saturday 2nd April), I was up in London, for a meeting at the Mount Street Jesuit centre, on gay priests. This was one of a series of meetings arranged by the LGBT Young(er) Adults group associated with the former Soho Masses, and now with the Farm Street parish of St Cecilia, where twice a month LGBTI Catholics are specifically welcomed, and where they serve tea and coffee after Mass for their communuity – and for any others of the congregation who want to join them. At 64, I hardly count as a young or even “younger” adult, so have not previously attended any others in the series. In fact, I was not even aware of their existence, until this specific meeting was thrown open to all who are part of the Farm Street/Westminster LGBT Catholics community, in view of its importance.
I was delighted that I made the trip, for some stimulating discussion during the formal part of the evening, and then more over coffee, with friends old and new.
Openly gay Msgr Krysztof Charamsa (left), with partner
The chair for the evening introduced the discussion by briefly listing some recent news headlines of gay priests who had come out as gay, and the mixed reactions they had received. There was the high profile case of the CDF theologian Msgr Krysztof Charamsa, who on the eve of the 2015 Family Synod came out as not only gay but also partnered – and was promptly fired, from his post at the CDF, and also as university lecturer in theology. There were also many less well-publicized examples of ordinary parish priests, and others. Some, like Msgr Charamsa, met immediate trouble with their superiors, others did not. Some even met direct and explicit support from their congregations.
On Sunday morning 13th April, Fr Kieran Fitzsimons OFM came out publicly as gay, in a BBC radio interview on Radio Essex. On the evening of the same day, Brentwood cathedral was due to host a Mass with a special welcome to LGBT people and their families: in preparation for the Mass, Radio Essex, which covers much the same geographic area as the diocese, invited lgbt Catholics to join a radio discussion during the station’s breakfast show. Fr Kieran volunteered to join that discussion, and was duly interviewed as a priest of the diocese, and as an openly gay man, As Fr Kieran noted in the interview, his family and friends have known and accepted this for years, but this was the first time he had stated his position publicly. During the interview, Fr Kieran also referred briefly to an earlier time in his life, before entering the priesthood, when he had lived with a male partner. Continue reading London Priest Comes Out – on BBC Radio!→
Continuing with my free translation of gay theologian Monsignor Charamsa’s interview in Religion Digital.
Msgr Krzysztof Charamsa
Do you not think that the Vatican reacted swiftly and drastically with you, while doing the same with pedophile priests?
The reaction was automatic. Legalistic and formalistic automation is the soul of the Catholic Church to one who tells the truth, even though the pope Francisco continually speaks against legalistic formalities.
It is also true that many cases of pedophile priests were and are treated in a different way, not as drastic. Pedophilia is a shame on the Catholic clergy. It is related to the sexual immaturity of its members. It is not influenced by the world, as obsessively stated by the Church . It is the result of an obsession caused by repressed sexuality, sexuality which is rejected,not accepted, .
It is also true that at various levels of the Church pedophilia continues to be protected to save face and to avoid compensation for the damage caused. I’ll give an example. Late last summer the Polish Vatican nuncio, Archbishop Wesolowskiin died in prison, after conviction by the Congregation as a pedophile. This man had a funeral that lasted ten days, between the Vatican and Poland. 10 days’ burial for a prisoner who has already been tried by an ecclesiastical court for pedophilia abuse. The funeral began with a Mass celebrated by the Pope’s closest collaborators and ended ten days later in Poland with a reading of a letter it was said that the Dominican Republic accusations of pedophilia were merely Mafia inventions . The Vatican allowed all this show, rather than thinking immediately about how to compensate the victims of that pederast bishop. Seeing all this, one can conclude that there is a pedophile lobby in the Vatican. Yes, many pedophile priests and bishops have special treatment and many continue to be free from any penalty..
In this light the Vatican’s reaction to a gay priest who tells the truth is shamefully automatic. But this is the logic of the Church: all must remain hidden “for the good of the Church”. While hidden, nothing happens. For the Church “the devil” is the priest who tells the truth, which comes to light, the coming out of the closet.
Continuing with my free translation of gay theologian Monsignor Charamsa’s interview in Religion Digital.
Msgr Krzysztof Charamsa
Do spirituality and sensitivity attract gays to the altar? Are there more homosexuals in the Church than in other social institutions?
I am personally sure that is so. Often in the past, for a gay man to be a priest was a way to hide his homosexuality and make it socially. Today, probably it is only a functional reason in homophobic and backward societies. I imagine that in my country, Poland, it is still working well. I think today it is much more common that a gay man with his sensitivity and openness to the transcendent and the divine, wants to be a priest.
And in the Curia, are there many gays? Is there really the Vatican gay lobby that is often spoken about?
In this area also I can speak only of my experience. We have no studies on the presence of homosexuals in the clergy, because it is a taboo, a topic that should not be discussed. In the Curia there are many gays. Many of them are good priests, if they are not homophobic, if they do not think only of their career, if they do not care only money and power. The problem occurs when gays have internalized homophobia. In the Catholic clergy there are many homosexuals who, repressed by their own orientation, hate those who are gay like themselves.
The other issue is the gay lobby, which I have not come across. I read something about it in Italy, but I have not had any experience. It may be that there is this lobby, as there are Italian or Polish lobbies in the Vatican. The Vatican, the heart of the Church, is a blend of power struggles, politics and money. I also think that the Vatican is itself an Italian and international lobby imposing ideas that have never been seriously studied.
Is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith particularly homophobic? And its top leader in the Congregation, Cardinal Müller?
Yes,the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is the heart of a paranoid and irrational homophobia. In it there is no possibility of understanding and dialogue. It works by stereotypes.I had the impression that in the Congregation, faith in God was not promoted, we do not concern ourselves with Christology or Mariology, we only battle against gays and other sexual minorities. It is an obsession. This is our real faith: anti-gay paranoia. That’s all. It’s our favorite subject. There are meetings in which, of every three cases we discuss, two are against gays. We have invented an imaginary enemy and battle against it with all our strength. We call it “our war on gender”. There can be no discussions, we think that this gender can only promote sex changes. That is the level of paranoia which prevails in the Congregation..
Cardinal Müller has promoted all this ignorance, this extremism, this obsession among the top staff, without any reasoning. Instead of promoting studies, the Congregation is a political agency to sabotage the pontificate of Pope Francis and his synodal discussion. It is the agency that fights gender, which it doesn’t even know how to define. What is of importance is to use the word gender in ways that frighten people, no matter who has not read a single book on gender studies. Obsessive homophobia and misogyny (the real feminofobia, a hatred of women) are a drama for this congregation, whose members are not all heterosexual. As everywhere, there are homosexuals. The reality is that the Congregation hates gays, eventhough it is known that there are homosexuals among its members.
Continuing with my free translation of gay theologian Monsignor Charamsa’s interview in Religion Digital. In this second extract he contrasts Church preaching of “mercy”, with its record of active persecution of homosexuals.
Msgr Krzysztof Charamsa
The Church preaches mercy, but continues to persecute homosexuals?
Yes, there is real persecution by the Catholic Church of both individuals and of the LGBTI community in general. It is persecution of sexual minorities that do not belong and can not belong to the heterosexual majority. It is an ideological project of the Church. My Church allows itself to say that we must fight against gays like we fought against Nazism. It compares us with the Nazis, the enemies of humanity. This statement has come from the mouth of African Cardinal Sarah in the middle of the synod, a pace which instead should be thinking about mercy for families. The Church is obsessed with homosexuality, just as with human sexuality in general.
Unfortunately, at this time of the church there is nobody able to open a serious discussion, free from all dictatorial ideology. The intellectual and spiritual level of the Pastors is generally not very high. So,there is a lack partners whom we could face up to in the Church. This is my experience in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: a cold, blind indoctrination, an automatic legalism, full of callous self-righteousness. With whom in the Church could we debate these human questions if the Church allows the words of Sarah? He should be denounced for the defamation of a social group. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith thinks like Sarah. They are obsessed with homosexuality.
A few days ago, Cardinal Kasper said that “the homosexual is born (that way).” It was the first time I heard this from a hierarch of the Church. How about you?
Yes, it is true, I think it is the first time. Cardinal Kasper is one of the few people in the Church who think. I do not share his position on moral judgment regarding homosexual acts by homosexual persons following their own nature. I think he says, on the one hand you are born homosexual, but at the same time he excludes these same people from the possibility of love, a possibility reserved only to heterosexual creatures. It is contradictory. In other words, if it is true that “one is born homosexual,” as he says, then Catholics have a problem with the homosexual issue. They should think again about the whole issue of sexual orientation, and then review the moral doctrine in light of this reflection.
However, with this sentence it seems to me that Cardinal Kasper continues the unfortunate theory of male-female complementarity. This approach is a truly Catholic mental construction, which has already been examined and is theoretically weak, if not false. Unfortunately, the term “complementarity” has become a slogan with which the Church wants to eliminate the discussion about gay people as God’s creatures looking for love. Thus the Church also promotes a homophobic false image of homosexuals, as people.naturally incapable of love In this way it promotes hatred in the public mind against LGBTI people, who are presented as abnormal. This is an ideological position of a church that is afraid to think. I’m sure this will happen in the future and the Church will ask forgiveness for this delay. These types of errors have been repeated in the history of the Church
Returning to Cardinal Kasper. He is a believer who continually thinks, with whom you can discuss. There are also others like him: as Cardinal. Schönborn, Cardinal. Marx, Archbishop Monsignor Forte or Archbishop Monsignor Bonny, to name a few, and not forgetting Pope Francis. They are men of God and the Church, sensitive, faithful, capable of meeting humanity and talking to her. But most are obsessed, unable to think and to love, as Cardinal. Sarah. Stigmatization promoted by the majority is a weapon.
Continuing with my free translation of Monsignor Charamsa’s interview in Religion Digital:
Msgr Krzysztof Charamsa
Do not you think that the Vatican reacted swiftly and drastically with you, while doing the same with pedophile priests?
The reaction was automatic. The legalistic and formalistic automation is the soul of the Catholic Church to the one who tells the truth, even though the pope Francisco continually speak against the legalistic formalities.
It is also true that many cases of pedophile priests were and are treated a different way, not as drastic. Pedophilia is a shame of the Catholic clergy. It is related to the sexual immaturity of its members. It is not influenced by the world, as stated by the Church obsessively. It is the result of an obsession caused by repressed sexuality, not accepted, rejected.
It is also true that at various levels of the Church pedophilia continues to be protected to save face and not compensation for the damage caused. I’ll give an example. Late last summer in prison died the Polish Vatican nuncio, Archbishop Wesolowski, judged by the Congregation as a pedophile. This man had a funeral that lasted ten days, between the Vatican and Poland. 10 days burial of a prisoner who has already been tried by an ecclesiastical court abused by pedophiles. The funeral began with a Mass celebrated by the Pope’s closest collaborators and ended after ten days in Poland with a reading of a letter it was said that the accusations of pedophilia were the only inventions Mafia Dominican Republic. The Vatican allowed all this show, rather than thinking about how to immediately compensate the victims of that pederast bishop. Seeing all this, one can conclude that there is a pedophile lobby in the Vatican. Yes, many pedophile priests and bishops have special treatment and many continue to be free from it.
In this light the Vatican’s reaction to a gay priest who tells the truth is a shameful automation. But this is the logic of the Church: all must remain hidden “for the good of the Church”. While hidden, nothing happens. For the Church “the devil” is the priest who tells the truth, which comes to light, the coming out of the closet.
Will you remain a priest, he will ask secularization or the will to impose?
Am and me Sorry priest. I’m better priest before today. Conversely, it is I who will ask Church to open your eyes.
Do you plan to write a book about his experiences in the Vatican?
Yes, I believe it my duty to further explain my experience in the Church, and do it for the good of the Church itself, which must become and apologize for their institutional scandals, for its delays, its irrational paranoia of homophobia. Anyone who sees and experiences it has a duty to awaken the Church, which has already exceeded all tolerable limit.
If the pope asked him personally, leave your partner and return to the Vatican?
No, I would not let my partner because I love her and because no doctrinal reason to. Having a partner, whether male or female, to a priest does not go against their faith, not against the doctrine of our faith. Conversely, the Church and the Pope who should start thinking seriously about the inhuman discipline of mandatory celibacy and his obsession with homosexuality and human sexuality in general.
Go back to the Vatican? No, not again. It should be a masochist, a person who seeks suffering and offense of their own identity. I’m not a masochist. The Vatican is one less holy places I’ve ever met in my life. I want to live happy, want to be holy, what it means to be happy and live in the light of God and the dignity of man. In the Vatican most people are not happy. It is a place that needs a spiritual and mental conversion. God needs air, air that there needed.
