So, I Wrote a Letter to the Pope

As a queer person, I never imagined I would one day write a letter to the Pope.

Yet there I was, sitting at my computer, addressing an institution that once caused me profound pain.

For much of my life, Catholicism felt like a door that stayed closed.

I grew up in it. I made my First Communion. I knew its prayers, its rhythms, its silence. It was part of my family, my culture, my inheritance.

But as I came to understand myself, I also absorbed the message, spoken or implied, that there was something incompatible about who I was and where I belonged.

So I left.

Not all at once, but slowly, carrying a thousand small wounds. I tried other spiritual paths. Eventually, I stepped away completely.

Distance gave me room to breathe. It quieted the question of whether I was allowed to belong.

And still, I never fully lost the language of it.

Parable. Myth. Hymn. Symbol.

The language stayed even when I wasn’t inside it anymore.

The parables of Jesus still stay with me not because they explain anything, but because they don’t. They keep turning the question back on you.

I no longer experience myself as outside of it.

Not asking permission.

Not waiting to be let in.

Just there.

That shift is what made me write the letter.

Not to argue.

Not to demand.

I wrote because I care. My connection to the Church didn’t disappear just because it got complicated.

I now move through the sacramental life of the Church, even while holding deep questions about how LGBTQ+ people are received in it.

In the letter, I wrote:

“Many LGBTQ+ Catholics are not asking to be outside the Church, but to remain within it fully, faithfully, and without fear of exclusion or invisibility.”

Because many of us are already here.

In pews. In ministries. In families. In prayer. In silence.

Still living in that in-between space of being present but not fully seen.

For years I spoke of the Church like something separate from me.

But the Church is not only hierarchy.

The clergy are structure—bone.

The laity are flesh—the living body of prayer, service, doubt, and devotion.

We are the Church.

And if that is true, then LGBTQ+ Catholics are not outside asking to be let in.

We are already part of its life.

I show up in the pews as I am—nose ring, bright nails, tattoos—and I take up space.

As I returned to the Gospels, I stopped thinking in categories and started thinking in encounters.

Jesus speaks in parables that refuse to settle. He moves toward the margins. He unsettles people who are certain they already understand God.

And from the cross comes the line that stays with me:

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Not as erasure. As recognition of how easily people can fail to see the human being in front of them, even when they believe they are right.

That is why I don’t think the answer is exclusion.

It is encounter.

It is accompaniment.

It is refusing to reduce people to categories or caricatures, and seeing them as the Body of Christ in front of you.

I don’t know what the Church will become.

But I know what presence does.

It changes things slowly, whether anyone is ready for it or not.

For a long time I thought I would have to choose between my spiritual heritage and my queerness.

Instead, I found something simpler.

I stopped standing outside.