Those who leave the Catholic Church for ideological reasons will often fall back on the same sentiments, sentiments that the Church, maybe even organized religion as a whole, is stodgy and oppressive, old and outdated, and reliant on an immutable doctrine that in 2022 would be considered offensive. Former Catholic priest and Vatican official Krzysztof Charamsa wants to disrupt this idea. He would tell you that it is wrong, but it’s also holding back the next ideological revolution in the Catholic Church and stifling theological criticism from LGBT Catholics. In 2015 Charamsa made international headlines when he came out as a gay man on the eve of the Bishop’s Synod on the Family and was promptly fired from all Church positions. What most people don’t know is that since 2015 Charamsa has taken to theological academia, writing books and papers and leading LGBT allies from professors to priests in kicking off the next big revolution in Catholic thought since Copernicus and Galileo forced the Church to admit that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
Most important about Charamsa’s advocacy is that he diverges from the current strategy of many activist groups with respect to the Catholic Church simply because he firmly believes that the Catholic Church can change, and that change should be forced by activists effectively and urgently. Shortly after coming out, he wrote an autobiography, “The Cornerstone: My Rebellion against the Hypocrisy of the Church,” and he recently collaborated in the publication of the academic paper, “Academic Statement on the Ethics of Free and Faithful Same-Sex Relationships” written for Wijngaard’s Institute for Catholic Research and co-signed by 68 prominent doctoral scholars of theology. (The link to Charamsa’s foreword can be found at the bottom of this article.) Charamsa argues that despite the Church’s reluctance to change and the slow pace of the changes that have taken place, changes indeed have occurred, and a reversal of the Church’s position on LGBT people is bound to be next…