Thank you. I've written about Matthew LaBanca a couple times, tipped off before his story hit the news because he's friends with a writer for Prism & Pen, a Medium publication I co-founded.

The details of Matthew's story are even worse than what you've sketched here, although everything you wrote is accurate to my knowledge.

One juicy tidbit you left out is that the bishop of Matthew's diocese offered him a five-figure sum on the condition he never tell anyone why he left his positions at the school and in the church.

Everyone in Matthew's congregation knew he was gay, and that includes his pastor, who was very accepting. The order to fire him came straight from the bishop.

It's hard for me to imagine how anyone could support a church run by priests who must affirm that gay people are "intrinsically disordered" and commit "acts of grave depravity."

Those words are so foul and horrifying! Those hate-laced descriptors describe me and the people I love. Almost my entire extended family are Catholic, and at least one of them has had the good grace to leave the Church over those evil words. Her active leaving the church gave me feelings of acceptance and love. The rest of the family who remain, I don't know what to say. They're declaring their values to me, and I think less of them because of it.

It's very hard for me to understand how anyone could be part of a Church that stigmatizes and dehumanizes me in such a disgusting manner. That hate speech is part of the catechism even, taught to hundreds of millions of school children around the world every day.

I must take issue with your support of James Martin. He has affirmed over and over again that he supports every Catholic dogma and doctrine. Therefore, he is a homophobic bigot, and I hold him In the highest possible degree of contempt and loathing.

That foul homophobic bigot has even written articles counseling gay people that we should accept the disordered and depraved language in the catechism and other Church teachings.

That's enough to make me want to spit in his face. What a pig!

He is as evil and twisted as every other priest in the Catholic Church, which is to say very evil and twisted.

I wonder what it takes to make a person so evil that they voluntarily except the idea that human beings like me can be talked about using heinous words of hate like that? That's why I say all Catholic priests are evil and twisted.

As to Pope Francis's encouragement of Martin?. This is the same Pope Francis who stomped down on efforts to reform anti-gay doctrines in the German-speaking Catholic world. The same Pope Francis who put the topic off limits at the recently concluded synod.

This is the same Pope Francis who recently instructed bishops and priests in Italy to not admit gay men to seminary to train for the priesthood, because "the Vatican is already to full of fagotry."

The first time he said it, the Vatican (but not the Pope himself) issued an anodyne non-apology apology, you know — the kind where you say we're sorry if anyone was offended, but you don't actually apologize or make amends for what you said. The second time Pope Francis call us all faggots, the Vatican declined — pointedly— to issue a statement of any kind, let alone a sincere apology. Pope Francis has told us who and what he is.

We queer people know exactly where we stand with Pope Francis. He's a disgusting piece of shit — a vicious, committed, evil homophobic bigot.

With disgusting pigs like him and James Martin seen as our biggest allies in the Catholic Church, what hope do queer people actually have to be treated with dignity and humanity?

I'd say precisely zero.

It's tough for me to know somebody supports the Catholic Church with their attendance or their money or whatever — understanding that the church is teaching that I'm depraved and disordered.

I feel an intense amount of loathing for people who support that kind of heinous hate speech.

Not even getting into the issue of the Church's extraordinary misogyny and sexism, its homophobia and transphobia are enough for me to hold Catholics In the deepest possible personal disrespected and loathing.

Few institutions on earth do more to vilify and persecute people like me and those we love.

The stories you bring up here are just the tip of the iceberg. I could regale you with tales of firings and the like for hours on end, without stopping.

That's how twisted and evil the Catholic Church is.