I’m so glad you had this experience, but we must be very, very careful of how we frame stories like this.

The Catholic Church takes two inherently and impossibly contradictory positions with respect to gay people.

The first part of their position is gay people (in the words of the catechism taught to children at every Catholic school in the world) commit acts of “grave depravity,” as human beings are “intrinsically disordered,” and are ordered toward “great moral evil.”

Then, and only after spelling out that viciously hateful condemnation of gay people, does the catechism instruct that people should love them anyway.

The dissonance in that position is irreconcilable. The damage Catholic leaders do by calling us depraved, disordered, and evil cannot be overcome by telling people to love us anyway.

We must always remember and must always remind people that Catholic doctrines with respect to LGBTQ people are foul and horrifying.