‘I am a gay priest who is happy': Vatican official fired after coming out on eve of Church conf.

On Saturday evening, as hundreds of bishops convened in Rome for a major church assembly on family issues, former Vatican priest Krzysztof Charamsa headed a mile across town to a different gathering: the founding meeting of the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics, a group of 13 organizations advocating for inclusion of gays in the church.

Charamsa had lost his job just before, when he was fired from his position in the Vatican’s doctrine office after announcing that he was gay and introducing reporters to his boyfriend.

“I want the Church and my community to know who I am: a gay priest who is happy, and proud of his identity,” he told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in an interview published Saturday. “I’m prepared to pay the consequences, but it’s time the Church opened its eyes, and realized that offering gay believers total abstinence from a life of love is inhuman.”

The priest’s announcement came just 24 hours before the start of Pope Francis’s month-long synod on the family, which will discuss marriage, divorce and same-sex relationships.

Vatican officials bristled at the timing of Charamsa’s announcement, which spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi called “very serious and irresponsible, since it aims to subject the Synod assembly to undue media pressure.”

But the eyes of the media and the world likely would have been on the meeting anyway, since news emerged last week that the pope spoke with both Kentucky clerk Kim Davis (who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage license to same-sex couples) and a gay former student and his partner during his visit to the U.S. Observers within and outside the church have exhaustively dissected the details of those meetings in search of clues as to Francis’s plans for the synod.

If you bothered to read my original post, I never mentioned mere church attendance ( i.e., sitting on the pews and listening to a homily or sermon ), I mentioned FELLOWSHIP.

There are four clear, definite, practical steps to take here when immorality is present according to the teachings of the apostle Paul:

The first one is: There must be a right attitude. We must mourn and feel grief instead of harsh, critical judgment or tolerant, casual love.

The second step is: There must be a right basis for discipline. In the case of the unrepentant sinner, there has to be a basis otherwise everything will be tolerated.

In other words, apostolic and divine authority has already spoken in these areas — follow it through. In Matthew 18, Jesus tells us what to do in cases like this.

Step Three, “If he refuses to listen to them [the small group that has come to him], then tell it to the church,” (Matthew 18:17a RSV). Then it must become public; the individuals involved must sense the censure of the church, the feeling that this is not acceptable behavior to other Christians.

Now again this is not to be done in the spirit of self-righteous complacency, smugness, or critical judgment or censoriousness, nothing of that. It is to be done in a loving statement that this is wrong; it is unacceptable behavior; it cannot be allowed to continue even though you understand the pressures and the problems involved in it. Therefore, it is to be told to the whole church and everyone in the church, then, becomes responsible to try to help that individual to recover from this terrible situation.

Finally, Step 4, : If he will not hear the church then “Change your attitude toward him,” the Lord is saying, “let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector, as a sinner,” (Matthew 18:17b). In other words, let him be unto you as though he is not a Christian at all. He has declared himself not to be a Christian by his actions — even though he claims yet to be a Christian by his words. You are to treat him as one who is not yet a Christian, but that does not mean with scorn, or with judgment, or with any kind of retribution. Recognize that he has deceived himself, and he is not really born again.

How do you treat someone as a non-Christian? Well, you can still be his friend, but I’m not sure if communion for instance should be given to such a person.

Fact is there has always been a fairly large homosexual subculture within the ranks of the Church for a very long time, in fact centuries. The Church policy of compulsory clerical celibacy was put into place in the Middle Ages with the primary intent of ending the widespread practices of simony and nepotism-—the transfer of Church property from one person to another and the passing on of Church property in families. The unintended consequence of this policy was the creation of a rather large homosexual subculture within the ranks of the clergy from priests and monks to the highest levels of the Vatican. I do not argue that the Church’s policy of compulsory clerical celibacy causes homosexuality or pedophilia. The policy did end up creating an all male environment where physical contact with the opposite sex was strictly forbidden, not to mention marriage, an atmosphere very attractive to homsexuals.

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