Pope Francis opened a key summit of family issues on Sunday, hours after a high-ranking official challenged the Vatican’s authority and teaching by coming out as gay.

The synod will see more than 300 bishops spend three weeks debating how the Catholic church should respond to issues such as divorce, remarriage and gay churchgoers. But while the runup to the meeting has seen carefully planned conferences pit traditionalists against progressives, it took just one Vatican official to shake the holy ground hours before the synod started.

Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, a Polish priest who has worked at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 2003, chose the eve of the meeting to announce he was in a gay relationship and accuse his superiors of an “inhuman” approach to gay Catholics.

“I want the church and my community to know who I am: a gay priest who is happy, and proud of his identity,” he told Italian daily Corriere della Sera. “It’s time the church opened its eyes, and realised that offering gay believers total abstinence from a life of love is inhuman.”

Well aware that his revelation would be the end of his career at the Holy See, Charamsa accused the Vatican of being “ignorant about homosexuality” and “lagging behind” on the issue of gay Catholics.

The Vatican’s top spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, swiftly dismissed Charamsa’s revelations as “very serious and irresponsible”, confirming the Pole had lost his job.

It has been a tumultuous week for the Vatican, with Lombardi’s speedy statement on Saturday the latest in a series of swift dispatches on the pope’s perceived view on gay relationships. Just a day earlier, he’d distanced the Vatican from Kim Davis, a US clerk jailed for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licences, who met the pope during his visit to the US in September.

The Holy See was also trying to play down an encounter the pontiff had with a couple from the opposite camp in Washington, DC; an openly gay man and his partner.

Lombardi said Yayo Grassi, a former student of Pope Francis, had asked to present his mother and “several friends” to the pope in Washington. “The pope, as pastor, has maintained many personal relationships with people in a spirit of kindness, welcome and dialogue,” Lombardi said in a statement on Friday.

Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, left, with his boyfriend Eduard, surname not given. Charamsa told Corriera della Sera he was proud of his identity as a gay priest. Photograph: Alessandra Tarantino/AP

But while the Vatican hopes recent events will not overshadow the synod, some Catholics will want them to spur bishops into a radical rethinking. Church teaching currently defines same-sex relationships as “intrinsically disordered” and demands gay people live a life of chastity, but opponents argue this fails to address the reality in which the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics are living.

Mary McAleese, former president of Ireland, which earlier this year legalised same-sex marriage, said on Saturday it was the church’s teaching itself which was intrinsically disordered.

“The gravitational pull of tradition is used as a vehicle for refusing to face the growing reality, accepted by many people in this world, that the church’s teaching on homosexuality is simply wrong,” she said to rapturous applause at a meeting of the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics in Rome.

Martin Pendergast, a British campaigner on LGBT faith issues, said he hoped Charamsa’s coming out in particular would pave the way for a more open debate at the synod. “It may encourage others, particularly bishops who might have been nervous about talking too radically about divorce, remarriage and same-sex relationships, to speak more openly and more honestly,” he said at the Rainbow Catholics event.



Although the LGBT community has been bolstered by Charamsa’s revelations, campaigners still face a considerable challenge in trying to get bishops to change their stance on same-sex relationships.

A document released halfway through last year’s synod showed churchmen moving towards a more open approach to gay Catholics, but fierce protest from conservatives saw these paragraphs stripped from the final text approved by bishops.

Well aware that the battle would recommence this year, traditionalists launched a petition calling on Pope Francis to ensure there is no change to Church doctrine. Before the start of the synod, the group said they had collected over 810,000 signatures.