The Doorway Religious Outrage Keeps Blocking
Chapter 1: The Post That Made Me Stop Scrolling The blue light from my phone was the brightest thing in the room. It was late enough that I should have been putting the day away, but I was still scrolling when a Vatican-associated social media post appeared in my feed. The post criticized what it described as the LGBTQ+ agenda and presented gay people as part of a moral problem that faithful Christians should resist. I read it once, then again, because the tone carried the confidence of an institution speaking as though it occupied the clean side of a moral divide. My first angry thought was blunt: “Interesting opinion from a bunch of pedophiles.” That reaction did not come from nowhere. It came from knowing that the Catholic Church in Spain is still facing painful questions about sexual abuse by clergy, institutional silence, and the treatment of survivors. Only weeks earlier, Pope Leo XIV had met in Madrid with people who said they had suffered abuse within the Church. Spain h...