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Overdue debate
This debate is overdue, says Mönkebüscher, because people who are in the service of the church still have to hide their sexual orientation if they don’t conform to the traditional moral concepts represented by the Vatican. Otherwise, quite a few of them would face consequences under labor law, for example.
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“A community officer who wants to marry her girlfriend is automatically fired from her job,” explains Mönkebüscher. Even chief physicians, nurses and other people in medical professions were previously dismissed from church employment in such cases differentiated between “professions close to proclamation and professions far from proclamation”.
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inner turmoil
The official rejection of homosexuality drives many queer people in church professions to an inner “disturbance,” says the pastor. The topic of transgender people is “even more taboo” on the part of the church leadership.
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Mönkebüscher came out as homosexual two and a half years ago. He himself has experienced “that it is an incredible challenge to accept oneself as one is” in a church environment “that denies homosexuality, does not want to admit it, sees it as gravely sinful, as disorderly, as not in accordance with natural law”. . Like many other queer people, he had struggled with feelings of guilt and depression “and also with suicidal thoughts”.
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Constant hide and seek
Many homosexuals or trans people in the church would “console themselves over the discriminatory doctrine of the Vatican by saying: My understanding of the church is different, I believe in the God of love, and I separate the church god from the god in whom I believe”. so Mönkebüscher. But he is convinced that the constant game of hide and seek makes people sick in the long run.
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The many positive reactions he has already received to the #OutInChurch initiative made him confident, says Mönkebüscher. In order to achieve concrete improvements, he also sees a need for politics. For a long time, the Catholic Church functioned as a “closed system” because the state did not prevent it. However, the recognition of homosexuals and trans people is about elementary fundamental rights.
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“Church can have its own norms, but where they contradict human rights, where it really is an invasion of privacy – and that’s what we’re talking about here – I think society, politics is needed, to change that as soon as possible. Not tomorrow, not today, but yesterday.”
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The initiative, which was likely to attract a great deal of attention through the ARD documentary “How God Created Us”, worked “like a liberation” for many who had now decided to come out despite professional and personal risks. Mönkebüscher hopes things will start moving: “It must be possible for a queer person to be able to say in the church how they feel, who they love and how they love.”
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The documentation “How God Made Us” by Hajo Seppelt, Katharina Kühn, Marc Rosenthal and Peter Wozny runs this Monday, January 24, 2022, at 8:30 p.m. on the first. She’s in the too ARD media library to see.
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