Saturday, October 31, 2015

Krzysztof Charamsa's Letter to the Pope in English Translation: "I’ve Made the Decision to Publicly Refuse the Violence of the Church with Regard to [LBTI] People"



Because Giova Gallagher has kindly pointed us in a comment here to an English translation of the full text of Monsignor  Krzysztof Charamsa's letter to Pope Francis at the Crux website, I'm going to leave a final note before I begin my two-week retreat, sharing that link with all of you, with much gratitude to Giova for finding it for us. The Crux article (by Gaia Pianigiani of New York Times) says that the translation is by Crux.

A section that leaps out at me, which I have not seen quoted in any media reports up to now:

After a long and painful period of inner discernment and prayer, before God and with full consciousness of the gravity of the moment, I’ve made the decision to publicly refuse the violence of the Church with regard to people who are homosexual, lesbian, bi-sexual, transsexual and intersexual.

To which I say a hearty Amen. I'm there, too. I'm tired, perhaps above all, of the games that the centrist-"liberal" Catholic media keep playing with LGBT lives, as they shut us out of conversations, or — as Southern white "liberals" did during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s with the African-American community — as they choose carefully selected, sanitized LGBT voices to talk about how their experience of the Catholic church is such a hunky-dory, wonderful experience of being included and loved.

That insulting tactic is so deplorable on moral grounds, since it shuts out of the Catholic conversation all the other gay voices — and they are legion, as Krzysztof Charamsa has himself repeatedly noted — who experience hurt, exclusion, attacks, marginalization, having their lives made a living hell, by Catholic pastoral leaders. This tactic implies that the suffering of all those other LGBT people is not real and does not implicate the Catholic community, or that those witnessing to this suffering imposed on their lives are fabricating their narratives of suffering. 

The intellectual dishonesty and moral vapidity of the Catholic center, of the people controlling access to the public spaces in which these experiences may be discussed in the Catholic media and Catholic academy, deeply troubles me. It's frankly appalling.

Back in two weeks! Meanwhile, a happy Samhain / Hallowe'en to all of you to whom such rituals of the turning of the year speak.

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