Matt Cain’s article (So Pope Francis has deigned to ‘bless’ gay couples? That’s not a blessing, it’s an insult, 19 December) appeared the same day as Lizzie Cernik’s interview with me and my husband (How we met after 60, 19 December), and Cain’s experience is uncannily parallel to mine. Born into the Catholic church, I also served as an altar boy, and as I became aware of my sexuality, I buried it very deep. I’m an intelligent person, but my grades in Catholic high school plummeted, and my parents ignored the pain that I was going through.
The problem is that “shut-down-ness” leads one to make bad decisions in life. My entire career path is populated with one disaster of an ill-fitting job after another. Years of therapy, and a late encounter with Buddhism, helped me to undo most of the damage.
I have to agree with Cain: the church gives with one hand, but insultingly takes away with the other. In its judgment, we gay men and women are still “sinners”. However, I think most people do not understand that the church is fundamentally anti-sex in general. It’s a sad attitude that denies the beauty of love, and its physical manifestation, no matter what gender. One day maybe society can outgrow this medieval belief.
Sterling M Fuller-Lewis
Talent, Oregon, US
• I’m not a Catholic, so I don’t care what the pope thinks about gay issues. However, I do care about the issues raised in Matt Cain’s article, namely having to put up with others in society deciding what is and what isn’t OK about being gay. One significant part of the article was that in the questions around the morality of homosexuality, there was “no thought given to gay children” at his school.
In the 1970s, when I was at school, there was no thought given to gay children at school, at home – anywhere. Perhaps the worst thing about that, which so many gay people of my generation and others will be very aware of, is the way the individual was left to deal with the burden of being gay on their own, often with no one to talk to about it.
This happened at a time of life when, like other teenagers, I was searching for a sense of identity. Being gay, and therefore “wrong”, I didn’t find a place that was acceptable then and I didn’t feel accepted in the world I’d grown up in. It wasn’t until later in life (in my 30s) that I was able to develop a more positive view of my sexuality, by which time the damage had been done. To have complete or partial acceptance now doesn’t make a difference to that early experience of rejection.
Name and address supplied
• I’m Catholic. My son is gay and is now engaged to a wonderful man whom I also call “son” because he is. When my son came out, I realised that it was the hardest thing he would ever do in his life, and I was so proud of him.
The pope has taken one very small step towards recognising gays and lesbians. Is it enough? No it is not. The church is a mess. Unless drastic action is taken, it will continue to lose members and will eventually collapse.
I find that I must believe in something bigger than me. Call it a holy higher power. We all need something bigger to get through lonely or miserable periods in our lives. Perhaps nature is your god? Or Gaia, the ancestral mother of all life? Matt Cain’s words will make many others think about what gay men have suffered by being raised as Catholics in years gone by, and even nowadays.
Tom Richards
Beara, County Cork, Ireland
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