This is a rather sad story. Monsignor Krzysztof Olaf Charamsa came out yesterday on the news as a gay priest and within hours the catholic church was confirming that he had been sacked both in the Vatican (working at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) and in his universities (the Gregorian and the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum) for precisely this. His role as a priest is also now under review. This is very speedy from a Church that historically takes its time, and it seems to fly in the face of Francis’s own most famous comment in 2013 “Who are we to judge” when he was in fact talking precisely about the prevalence of gay priests in the Vatican. Well, judgement has been pretty swift and brutal. How about that for Papal irony.
This is what the Monsignor said yesterday:
“My decision of ‘coming out’ is a very personal decision in the homophobic world of the Catholic Church. It has been very difficult and very hard. I ask that you keep in mind this reality that is difficult to understand for anyone who has not lived through an identical passage in their own life,” Charamsa told reporters.
“The timing is not intended to pressurize anyone, but maybe a good pressure, in fact a Christian participation, a Christian voice that wants to bring to the synod the response of the homosexual believers to the questioning of Pope Francis.”
Just for the record, I rather like Pope Francis. Among other things, he is great friends with one of the more progressive Rabbis, Rabbi Skorka, and he projects a very positive image.
When the Pope made his comments on the Plane, he was actually responding to a question about Monsignor Ricca who Francis had appointed to be Institute for the Works of Religion and who had a fairly squalid relationship with a man called Patrick Haari in Uraguay before being summoned back to Rome.
Here is what the New York Times wrote back then:
ROME — For generations, homosexuality has largely been a taboo topic for the Vatican, ignored altogether or treated as “an intrinsic moral evil,” in the words of the previous pope.
In that context, brief remarks by Pope Francis suggesting that he would not judge priests for their sexual orientation, made aboard the papal airplane on the way back from his first foreign trip, to Brazil, resonated through the church. Never veering from church doctrine opposing homosexuality, Francis did strike a more compassionate tone than that of his predecessors, some of whom had largely avoided even saying the more colloquial “gay.”
“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis told reporters, speaking in Italian but using the English word “gay.”
….
Francis did not dodge a single question, even thanking the person who prompted his comments on homosexuality, asking about Italian news reports of a “gay lobby” inside the Vatican, with clerics blackmailing one another with information about sexual missteps.
“So much is written about the gay lobby. I have yet to find on a Vatican identity card the word ‘gay,’ ” Francis said, chuckling. “They say there are some gay people here. I think that when we encounter a gay person, we must make the distinction between the fact of a person being gay and the fact of a lobby, because lobbies are not good.”An article in the Italian weekly L’Espresso this month alleged that one of the advisers that Francis had appointed to look into the Vatican Bank, Msgr. Battista Ricca, had been accused of having gay trysts when he was a Vatican diplomat in Uruguay. The pope told reporters that nothing in the documentation he had seen substantiated the reports.
He added that such a lobby would be an issue, but that he did not have anything against gay people and that their sins should be forgiven like those of all Catholics. Francis said that homosexuals should be treated with dignity, and that no one should be subjected to blackmail or pressure because of sexual orientation.
“The problem isn’t having this orientation. The problem is making a lobby,” he said.
and the BBC on the same issue:
Pope Benedict XVI signed a document in 2005 that said men with deep-rooted homosexual tendencies should not be priests.
But Pope Francis said gay clergymen should be forgiven and their sins forgotten.
“The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this very well,” Pope Francis said in a wide-ranging 80-minute long interview with Vatican journalists.
“It says they should not be marginalised because of this but that they must be integrated into society.”
But he condemned what he described as lobbying by gay people.
“The problem is not having this orientation,” he said. “We must be brothers. The problem is lobbying by this orientation, or lobbies of greedy people, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies, so many lobbies. This is the worse problem.”
In the light of the refusal by the Vatican to recognise the appointment by France of Laurent Stefanini, it suggests that there is a wide chasm between what the Pope says and what he does, or what is done in his name. Vatican Spokesman Federico Lomardi said,
“The decision to make such a pointed statement on the eve of the opening of the Synod appears very serious and irresponsible, since it aims to subject the Synod assembly to undue media pressure. Monsignor Charamsa will certainly be unable to continue to carry out his previous work in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith and the Pontifical universities, while the other aspects of his situation shall remain the [responsibility] of his diocesean Ordinary.”
animate-tim.com 