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Sterling M Fuller-Lewis, Tom Richards and another reader on the leader of the Catholic church giving conditional approval for its priests to bless same-sex couplesMatt 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. Continue reading...