Madam, - I too bear witness to the legacy of Pope John Paul the Great. The man did a power of good in ways that have been recognised and celebrated worldwide. There is, nonetheless another side, which I would much prefer to forget. I cannot.
In fact I believe that if I don't speak "the very stones themselves will cry out". For Pope John Paul II did lesbian, gay, transgendered and bisexual peoples untold harm. His writings and his teachings to the very end saw our struggle and us not only worthy of condemnation, but as some kind of sinister plot to undermine the very foundations of civilisation itself. If the truth were told John Paul II in his continuous and consistent rejection of our struggle for equality tried to rob us of our very souls.
I bore first-hand witness to this in my 24 years of priestly ministry to gay men suffering and dying from HIV/Aids. Again and again during the 1980s and 1990s, at the very height of the pandemic in New York primarily and then in London, it was my pain and privilege to hold the hand of young Catholic gay men in their twenties and thirties and try to reassure them that they were not condemned to eternal damnation because of what their Church taught about their orientation and their loving sexual behaviour. Men too young to have imagined their lives, never mind their deaths. Young people that we hear "the Pope loved" on the edge of despair as they went to meet their God, because of what the Holy Father taught in the name of Christ.
There is no god worth believing in to my mind that would so brutally condemn whole multitudes of utterly vulnerable people to such ignominious agony of mind and spirit as they draw their last breath. Most tragically of all for me as a Catholic priest was that at least three of the people I assisted were fellow priests, two of whom like myself were Irish born - gay men tortured and tormented as they went to meet their Maker by the very Church to which they had given their lives. Their families and religious communities did not want to know what was happening.
This too is the legacy of Pope John Paul that he must now answer for in the presence of our gay brothers to whom in this life he gave so little to quench their eternal thirst.
How, one may well ask, can any self-respecting gay man or woman stay within such an oppressive and, for us, a dehumanising institution? Many hundreds of thousands of others have understandably walked away. Every single day I think of doing the same. Yet here I am, an openly gay Catholic priest, and still I believe and hope and love from within its ranks.
I do not seek to justify my position either to those on the outside looking in, or on the inside who would willingly give me a one-way ticket out. There is, I believe, no way I can or desire to justify my position to the institutional church that bears my kind and me such deep disrespect. To even begin to do so would, as I see it, stoop to a level of argument that I have lost even before I begin.
Within the limitations of my knowledge I understand the Church's reasons for counting me out: scripture, tradition, natural law et al. But I am not interested, no matter how plausible their syllogisms or coherent their rhetoric and logic. It is not good enough. It is not good enough for any religion that claims to represent the God of the Universe to exclude 10 per cent of the people of the world from co-equality in humanity and in love in the name of that God no matter who his representative is in this time called life.
If God is love - and I absolutely believe He/She is - then we as LGTB peoples are coequally made in the divine image and have not only the right but the responsibility to live in that love personally, sexually and spiritually as witness to the fact that love, not power, has the last word.
Pope John Paul II was a good and holy human man, but for me and with me he too was a sinner. It was his sin that blinded him to us as gay people.
I pray his successor may have a little more sight. If not, I shall still go on believing, hoping and loving until John Paul and I embrace one another as coequals in God the eternal lover of all. - Yours, etc.,
Rev Dr BERNARD J LYNCH, Camden, London NW1.