It is a real pleasure for me to introduce you to my dearest friend Carlos Osma's book which gives its readers the opportunity to reflect upon the relationship between religion, sexual orientation and sexual identity. Stigma, discrimination and persecution against LGBTIQ people carried out by different religions has always been a painful issue for LGBTIQ religious people.
Four thoughts came to my mind reading the title and the text of this book. I believe they are really meaningful and worth sharing.
1. “Only a Faggot Jesus can save us”. To my understanding this title means that only a Jesus who represents us all: gay, lesbian, women, black, refugees, persons with disabilities, victims of domestic violence and social injustice, the poor and the marginalized. Indeed, only a Jesus who identifies with each and all of us can save humankind, can make us happy.
What Christians know as “salvation” can be explain with such terms as happiness, peace, life itself. When Catholics refer to someone as a blessed or a saint, they want indicate a person who is happy. Blessed means happy (Sermon on the Mount, Mt 5). Any true religion in its essence, should seek and encourage everyone’s happiness, meaning salvation, peace, life, full dignity, real freedom, or, in words of Jon Sobrino: “Salvation is pure air that the spirit could breathe to move towards becoming more human”.
That is how I interpret book’s title. If Jesus did not represent each and everyone of us, his salvation, his promised happiness would be a lie. That is why I agree with Carlos. If Jesus did not represent a gay or a lesbian person, if he did not represent a trans or bisexual person and many more, if he is not a woman, a sexual harassment victim, a person with disabilities, then, he is not a Jesus who could save and make us happy. If he excludes even one person, he cannot save anyone.
An exclusively white, heterosexual, macho and ecclesiastical Jesus cannot save anyone because he would not be neither a symbol of God nor a symbol of Humanity, as theologian Roger Haight says.
Religion loses its essence if it cannot offer salvation and provide happiness, which is essential for any religion to be considered respectable. Carlos has a mature consciousness of this dark side of Christianity. That causes many people to suffer pain. In this homophobic religious context, I am convinced that we have a moral duty to “exile ourselves from this kind of religion”. I personally identify as an “exiled from the official Catholic religion”: exiled who has come to know that “homophobe, evangelical or Catholic orthodoxy” is like a gas chamber for all those LGBTIQ people who have unfortunately been born within such environment.
I like the clarity of Carlos’ message especially in this time when we should ask ourselves as LGBTIQ catholic people or as Catholic organizations if we have a project for real change against homophobia in our church. I personally think that many projects for survival, provide beautiful help for those LGTBIQ faith people within this perverse system that acts against them. Those are respectable projects and may have an important psychological, spiritual or existential meaning to prevent people from ending their lives or losing hope. I wonder if there is also a project with a more important objective, to protest and claim for the end of homophobia in the religious system. The lack of this kind of project is our grave sin. It is the Catholics, gay or straight, grave sin. It is also the sin of hundreds of secular activists when we prefer not to attack a guilty religion and we turn into necessary silent collaborators of the religious homophobic wicked system that acts against us.
3. Little by little and thanks to the progress in human rights, we are coming to accept and respect diversity in social and family life, at school, at work or in the media. Conversely, it has become forbidden to accept this diversity when we enter a church or when the institutional Church, as the Catholic one, influences and organizes social life against LGTBIQ people, against women and against their own persecuted victims. Nowadays, social forces such as education, politics, economy, communication, private and public life, are increasingly respecting sex/gender diversity. Religion is the only power left that rejects diversity.
There, lies the importance of any book referring to homosexuality and religion, in favour of human rights, dignity and respect for LGBTIQ people that many religions oppose.
4. Carlos dedicates his book to his family, to his husband and his two daughters. This is the true manifesto of his book. I would say a spiritual and religious manifesto. Carlos has found the salvation that religion is searching for and often loses, because stigmatizes people. He finds happiness close to him, within his own family. He finds salvation in love, which is exactly the one that Christianity lacks when it does not want to face personal nature’s mystery and, consequently, deforms Jesus, who no longer represents neither gay, nor woman, nor refugee, nor political prisoner, nor victim of the sexual violence of his own priests. This Jesus of religion without love, or of religion with an artificial and discriminatory love, is nobody. Therefore, we come to another premise: only love can save us, free us, makes us happy. A love with no labels or confessions, a love as you have known it in your own life, a love that is the answer to your nature and your sexuality.
Love can never be a political nor religious decision. Religion and society should mainly respect and protect love. That is what Jesus did and how Jesus would act.
Congratulations for your book Carlos. Congratulations for all our shared struggles. Remember, a change in religion depends on us all. It is our own decision here and now.
Krzysztof Charamsa
Krzysztof Charamsa. Born in Poland with residence in Barcelona. Doctor in Theology by the Faculty of Theology of the Pontifical Gregorian Univesity. Author of books such as La Primera Piedra (The first Stone). Human rights defender, specially LGTBIQ and feminist. Catholic priest.
The book is available at:
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