Berlin Catholics Welcome the Queer Community
Father Jan Korditschke never intended to “come out,” at least not publicly. After spending years coming to terms with his own sexuality, the Catholic priest had told his family and close friends that he identified as gay, planning for that to be the extent of it.
“I realized when I lived totally closeted I didn’t know about any other gay, lesbian, trans, intersex, bisexual Catholics, so there was nobody I could talk to,” Korditschke said. “I felt very much alone, very isolated, and very weak.”
Korditschke, 46, is from Berlin and now resides in Dresden to the south, where he leads spiritual retreats of silence and has become an outspoken advocate for queer acceptance and representation in Catholic spaces. He is a member of “Out In Church,” a group based in Germany that works toward LGBTQ+ acceptance in the Catholic Church and counters official
doctrines issued by the church that oppose same-sex relationships.
At a time when the number of German Catholics leaving the Church has been rising— more than a half million people last year according to one report — many in the queer community are finding a home. The trend is particularly strong in the Berlin area, long known for its open and inclusive attitudes.
After Korditschke went through his own self-acceptance process, the priest realized that he could provide a powerful example of representation. In a recent interview he appeared solemn, taking pauses before he spoke, to consider everything he wanted to say.
“It was a process to come to terms with my own homosexuality and to accept this as the way God has created me,” he said. “Something that is in no way bad or deficient and something that I not only can accept, but also that I can love about myself.”
Korditschke’s initial plan to keep his sexuality mostly private began to change as he noticed discrimination against LGBTQ+ Catholics. He watched as queer couples were denied the ritual of receiving the sacrament. He watched gay Catholics lose their jobs or volunteer positions in the Church. It prompted him to do something to challenge what he saw as an injustice in his community.
“As soon as there are other queer Catholics who become visible and you can talk to them and you can start conversations with them and you can collaborate with them, this gives you a lot of hope and a lot of strength,” he said. “I realized it can be very important for a lot of others for
me to be visible as, in that case, a gay Catholic priest.”
That has proved true for Manuel Armenteros Parras, 29, who works in Berlin’s advertising market. He was raised Catholic in Spain, where Catholicism dominates, and he could never have imagined seeing explicit LGBTQ+ representation in the Catholic Church — including the clergy
— until he arrived in Berlin.
“A gay priest, or a counselor focused on queer issues — I mean they wouldn’t even exist in Spain. They would be expelled immediately, I’m sure,” he said. “I’m happy that this representation exists. I don’t think that there is space for [this] in Spain nowadays, but it goes hand-in-hand with Berlin. It’s much more open in general than in Spain.”
Living in Berlin, far from his family, has prompted Armenteros Parras to include religion in his life mainly as a way to feel connected to his family.
Sitting in a Charlottenburg coffee shop, he unhooks his necklace and puts it on the table. He explains each charm that hangs from the silver chain. He recieved one pendant at his baptism and says that another represents St. Anna, the patron saint of the village his parents are from.
He then pulls out a black leather wallet, unzips it and takes out a prayer card of Jesús Nazareno (Jesus of Nazareth). Keeping these items with him reminds him of his family, who want him to keep these things with him. So he does, keeping the necklace around his neck and the card in his wallet at all times.
When Armenteros Parras first came out as gay to his Catholic mother, she tried to dissuade him from expressing his sexuality. She referred him to a therapist who he now believes was a conversion therapist. Armenteros Parras’ relationship with his mother has since improved, and she accepts his sexual orientation, so he is able to continue finding solace in Catholicism.
“There was a lot of shame, also,” he recalls, not only in relation to the religious, but also to family. “For me, they’re very attached — religion and family — these huge institutions,” he said. “I knew you’re not supposed to do this. Or I mean, people don’t really approve of it.”
Korditschke, the priest who now leads silent retreats in Dresden, was raised in Germany in what he describes as a secular family. Following a religious experience he had at the age of 11, Korditschke spent the next five years on a religious and spiritual journey that led him to convert to Catholicism at the age of 16. He was drawn specifically to the Jesuit order due to its focus on community and its wide variety of pastoral work opportunities.
“From the very beginning I was very impressed with Ignatian spirituality, which is a spirituality of discernment. They don’t tell you that you have to do this, and not to do that. It’s rather, ‘okay, pay attention to what’s going on within you, what’s going on in the world around you.’ It helped me a lot on my path and with my own personal decisions,” he said.
As Korditschke made his way through seminary and began working, he found himself experiencing internalized homophobia, a feeling that his orientation was “some kind of defect,” a message he says he absorbed both from the Church and his secular upbringing.
“I was taught…[it was] not in accordance to the divine design plan of creation, something that is against natural law, and that any kind of homosexual act would be sinful,” Korditschke said.
At the same time, he was influenced in everyday life by the image of what a man and manliness should be — not homosexual. “That is a more secular homophobic tendency that has more to do with some version of toxic masculinity,” he said. “So I had very bad feelings about my own homosexuality. It was kind of like a burden that I had to carry.”
Korditschke says the negative stance that the Catholic Church has taken on queer people and relationships comes from more than 2,000 years of homophobia.
“I have to acknowledge that there is a long tradition of homophobia within the Church and that we have to recognize that Catholics have made grave mistakes during the past millennia and we really have to face this and we have to look at our way of looking at scripture,” he said.
Korditschke initially participated in an initiative called Liebe Gewinnt, or Love Wins, before joining the “Out In Church” initiative in January 2022. The group staged a large-scale “coming out” of over 100 officials and volunteers in January 2022, in reaction to the Catholic Church’s
official statements against same-sex relationships. Out In Church’s manifesto states that “such statements are no longer acceptable in the light of theological-scientific and human-scientific knowledge.”
Korditschke says he has received an overwhelmingly positive response. He was contacted by many media outlets and received an outpouring of messages commending his actions. He said it took him weeks to respond to all of the words of support.
This initiative was a reaction to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith’s 2021 reaffirmation that same-sex couples’ unions cannot be blessed by the Church. More than 100 churches in Germany provide such blessings and Korditschke does as well. He sees the blessing as an affirmation of the love and commitment a couple shares, whether they are queer or not, but says formal affirmation can be particularly meaningful to queer couples.
“In Latin, to bless means benedicere, it means to say that something is good,” Korditschke said. He calls gay, lesbian and other queer couples “precious” and lauds the way they rely on each other. “This is something to be thankful for and that we can praise God for and that we can ask
God to maintain and make prosper this precious gift,” he said.
At the historic Herz Jesu (Jesus Heart) church in eastern Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, children energetically zip around, calling to one another as they make their way from playground to sanctuary benches. The church, which was built between 1897 and 1898, has an almost maze-like courtyard with imposing six-foot high stone walls and iconography– carvings of Christ and
crosses. Hanging from a second-floor window is a pride flag. The word ‘pace,’ Italian for peace, is emblazoned across the rainbow.
That window belongs to the office of Theresia Härtel, a sexologist and pastoral worker in the Berlin area, and a key advocate of LGBTQ+ acceptance, which is spreading across Berlin’s Catholic community.
Härtel serves as the contact for queer-sensitive pastoral care within Bernhard Lichtenberg, the parish that Herz Jesu is within. Alongside Father Benno Rehländer, she serves as a resource for the queer community in the parish as well as those who may have questions regarding queer people in the Church.
Härtel says the German Catholic Church has established a line of communication with the Vatican called the synodal path, or Synodaler Weg in German, as it navigates reform. Part of this reform includes more rights for same-sex couples within the Church. At one meeting Härtel attended, a non-binary speaker discussed queerness in the Church in front of a group of bishops.
“It was possible to talk about all these questions between bishops and normal Catholic people,” Härtel said. “I’m pretty sure that most of the bishops never talked to nonbinary people before the Synodaler Weg, so it was just a possibility to connect people who would not have met
without it.”
As a master’s degree student in sexology, Härtel has found that education is the key to understanding. While writing her thesis, she discovered a gap between priests’ knowledge about sex and the knowledge that they needed to provide adequate pastoral care to their communities. She found they were being asked questions, especially from married couples, about things they were not familiar with due to their vows of celibacy. Härtel wears her passion for sex education on her ears, in the form of clay earrings in the shape of an anatomically correct vulva, swinging as she bustles through the church’s courtyard, greeting nearly every person that passes by.
Not only does Härtel believe it’s necessary to educate church workers about the queer community, but she says sex education in general can prevent abuse and help keep people from leaving the Church.
Getting people to stay in the Church is a major struggle for German Catholicism. The Bonn-based German Bishops’ Conference reported that nearly 523,000 people left the church in 2022.
Härtel noted that a loss of members leads to a lack of diversity, robbing the Church of those with different beliefs who can challenge mainstream ideas. She wants to see a more critical perspective on history and theology, going forward.
“We just want to think about what queer people tell us about God, because God made all of these people and it tells us a lot about God that he wanted to create queer people as well,” she said. “It’s a really nice view that the creation of God is so colorful and so creative, so open.”
In addition to her queer-sensitive pastoral work, Härtel leads a youth group at the Herz Jesu church. They meet weekly and discuss faith, with Härtel providing an open ear for any questions about the Church. Above all, she wants to make sure that the Church is a safe space. She holds up her smartphone, showing a holographic sticker that is on the back. It reads “faith spaces are safe spaces” with a rainbow above the words — her main goal expressed in a sticker.
“My most important task is just to show that faith spaces must be safe spaces.”
Father Rehländer, Härtel’s partner in providing pastoral services to queer people, says language that is affirming is crucial to bringing this about.
“I think it’s important to change your language a little bit, to have a language which is open for everyone and try to create a place where queer people feel at home and feel comfortable and feel that they have a church and parish where they are accepted and where they don’t have to play a
role,” he said.
Rehländer, who also does blessings for queer couples, says it is part of creating a welcoming environment for queer parishioners. “If someone asks me for a blessing, of course I will do this,” he said.
He stresses the Christian view that everyone is a child of God. “Every person is a child of God and it doesn’t matter how they live, how they love, and who they love, and I think that is something that the Church has to remember again,” he said.
Those clergy who favor inclusion — such as Rehländer and his Jesuit colleague Jan Korditschke — say the core of their beliefs align with the basic teachings of Christian theology. Korditschke sees it as the latest phase in a 2000-year struggle to “fully grasp the potential” within the Christian message.
“It has taken us many centuries to realize that slavery is not in accordance with the core values of Christianity,” Korditschke said. “And now we should learn that patriarchy, sexism, and also homophobia and racism, of course, are not compatible with the values of the Gospel.”
It took years for Korditschke to reconcile his sexual orientationwith his religious community. Now he and a growing number of German Catholics say it is time for the Church as a whole to do so as well.
Sierra van der Brug is a communication and English student at UC Santa Barbara. She is pursuing a minor in journalistic writing and is currently reporting from Berlin as part of ieiMedia’s “Berlin Beyond Borders” editorial team.
