Hell, that's their official stance today. The official Catholic catechism teaches millions of school children every day that we gay people commit "acts of grave depravity" when we have sex. Acts of grave depravity. I shudder every time I read those words, and I feel so desperately sad for kids who grow up believing that dogma.

And it isn't just theoretical. In my own state of Michigan, two large Catholic dioceses explicitly (in writing) prohibit all sacraments to gay people in committed relationships. No communion is a pretty big deal for Catholics. It essentially means that you are not part of the community. But it doesn't stop at no communion. The prohibitions even prohibit Catholic burial. It doesn't matter how active or supportive gay people have been in their parish. They are too sinful and unclean to "contaminate" their church cemetery where all their other family are buried.

You know, people get something of a false sense of reality from Pope Francis's periodic propagandizing on gay matters. The Roman Catholic Church treats gay people like shit, and Francis done next to nothing to change that.

He's done quite a lot, however, to fool people into believing otherwise — perhaps to try to make people more comfortable with the Church's hateful teachings and practices, probably hoping to staunch the blood flow of the rapidly rising exodus from Catholic pews.