Priest Fired by Vatican for Coming Out as Actively Gay

Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, a 43-year-old Polish priest working at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has been fired from his post, after coming out publically as an active homosexual Saturday.

The priest announced his plans to leave the priesthood to take up life with his Catalonian partner Eduard.

Charamsa, who only became an active homosexual while in the priesthood, has worked in the Vatican since 2003, as well as teaching theology at two different Roman universities.

“I know that the Church will see me as someone who has failed to keep a promise, who has lost his way, and what’s worse, not with a woman, but a man!” the priest told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. “I also know that I will have to give up the ministry, even though it is my whole life.”

Charamsa insists that he is not leaving the priesthood just to live with his partner. “The reasons are much wider-ranging and based on a reflection on Church doctrine,” he said.

The priest says he is “proud of his identity” and that he is “prepared to pay the consequences, but it’s time the Church opened its eyes.”

The Vatican criticized the way that Charamsa went about communicating his news to the public, as well as the timing of his announcement.

An official Vatican declaration said that “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.”

It also noted that the priest “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.”

Privately, Vatican sources told Breitbart that the story may be a bit more complicated than Charamsa is presenting it, noting that he preempted disciplinary action by coming out himself, endeavoring to capture “victim status” before being outed.

The priest claims that God has helped him take this “important existential step,” which he calls “the premise for living honestly.”

“The Church is already behind in tackling the issue, and we can’t wait another 50 years, which is why I’ve decided to tell the Church who I am,” he said. “I’m doing it for myself, for my community, and for the Church. It is also my duty towards the community of sexual minorities.”

The priest made his statement contemporaneously with the beginning of the Vatican Synod, saying that he wanted to tell the Synod that “homosexual love is a kind of family love, a love that needs the family.”

Charamsa said he intends to attend the LGBT Catholic International Meeting organized by the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics, which will take place in Rome at the same time as the Vatican Synod on Marriage and the Family, to support the position of gay activists.

“I reject and I denounce the current atmosphere of exasperating homophobia,” he said, who is urging the Church to change its teachings regarding the sin of Sodom, and to remove several points of the Catechism that deal with homosexuality.

Charamsa claims that the Bible “says nothing on the subject of homosexuality” and that the “biblical sodomite has nothing to do with two gays that love each other in modern-day Italy and want to marry,” a statement most theologians and biblical scholars would disagree with.

Presbyterian scholar Dr. Robert Gagnon is the author of one of the most authoritative and exhaustive treatments on the topic, titled “The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics,” which has been praised as “the best single treatment of the issue” of the Bible and homosexuality.

According to Gagnon, the Bible clearly teaches that “same-sex intercourse is intrinsically sinful,” regardless of the cultural context in which it occurs. Scripture, he writes, regards the violation of the man-woman prerequisite for sexual relations as “the ultimate sacrilege against God’s design of male and female.”

Though Charamsa says he thinks he was always gay, he denied it for years, submitting “zealously to the teaching of the Church and to the life it forced upon me.” It was only later that he took the step of acting on his inclinations.

“I now have a partner who has helped me transform my fears into the power of love,” he said.

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome