In a concerted action, people employed by the Church have revealed their homosexuality on a website and in a television documentary. A total of 125 people came out to the German Catholic Church at the same time on January 24, 2022.
The people who have come out work full-time or volunteer for the Church. The initiative is called “#OutInChurch – for a Church without fear.”
These hundred Catholics are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. They denounce the “discrimination and exclusion” they suffer. They demand “free access” to pastoral professions.
Under the slogan #OutInChurch, these militants have published a manifesto calling for “a change in the discriminatory work code of the Catholic Church,” as well as the removal of “degrading and excluding wording” in jobs.
They also want the end of a “system of concealment, double morality and dishonesty” regarding the LGBT issue in the Church.
Members of the initiative say that “neither sexual orientation or gender identity” nor the “engagement in a non-heterosexual relationship or marriage” should be “a barrier to employment or a reason for dismissal,” in a manifesto published on their site.
Church employees are subject to the basic work regulations of the institution. They must respect the obligations of loyalty, which include the orientation of their way of life on the doctrine of the Church in matters of faith and morals.
Entering into a same-sex marriage can be considered a violation of this obligation and lead to the termination of the employment contract.
This is why the initiative still calls for “non-discriminatory access to all areas of work within the Church.”
The spirited manifesto explains on this subject: “Most of us have had many experiences of discrimination and exclusion, including in the Church.”
“The Magisterium of the Church affirms in particular that we cannot ‘establish correct relations’ with others, that we are failing in our humanity because of our ‘objectively disordered inclinations’ and that homosexual relations cannot be recognized ‘as ordered to the revealed purposes of God.’”
“Such statements are no longer acceptable or debatable according to current knowledge in theology, natural sciences, and human sciences. As a result, non-heterosexual love, orientation, gender, and sexuality are defamed and our personalities devalued.”
Such discrimination is a betrayal of the Gospel and goes against the evangelical mission of the Church, which is to be “the sign and the means of intimate union with God and of the unity of all the human race.”
Such a revelation carried out with such publicity has no other purpose than to claim, through media pressure, what the Church has declared impossible, in particular by the response of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith given on March 15, 2021. This is the second reaction of this kind, after the general blessing of homosexual couples in Germany on May 1st.
