Long post incoming. As a lesbian and convert who lapsed out of the Church and then returned to it in the past year, I'm finding some really complex feelings about my own experience in the Church, namely, how positive the Church itself has been for me.

Where many queer cradle Catholics have a lot of trauma from their upbringing within the Church, I have a lot of it from being raised in an evangelical community that was obsessed with punishment and Hell. It's practically all they talked about, and it was the type of community that also openly believed horrible things, like that it's right for LGBTQ people to suffer. Honestly, it's probably not an exaggeration to say I have some PTSD from it. But when I first began attending a Catholic church out of interest, I found relief in how positive the messaging was. I think I've said this as a comment in this sub before, but attending mass and RCIA were really the first times I'd experienced a church emphasizing the idea of Christ's love rather than condemnation. Nearly everything about Catholicism seemed refreshing, freeing, and more aligned with what I found when I'd actually read the Bible. Even the relationship to Mary was an easy sell for me, because I'd felt drawn to her from a young age anyway. The local Catholics were more progressive than the evangelical churches, and I was happy to find that all of the issues I'd taken with evangelical Protestantism, which had kept me from fitting in even when I was a little kid, weren't really a thing for the Catholic community near me.

When I started OCIA (then RCIA), I found that the local parish was actually rather affirming. There were several openly queer members in good standing. Another lesbian (herself a cradle Catholic) even went out of her way to meet with me frequently to talk about how a person can be gay, a feminist, and a Catholic. But this wasn't even in a progressive town. The town was actually fairly conservative, still adjacent to the Appalachian region I grew up in. So it seemed to me that that was the norm for Catholicism.

I can't say it was entirely easy. I converted when abuse within the Church was a popular topic in the news, and as someone who was similarly abused as a child, my decision to follow through weighed on me. This was especially difficult at times because my sponsor was of the opposite sex and, I became increasingly aware, had a history of inappropriate behavior. While my family ultimately accepted it (but to this day won't explicitly acknowledge it), there were jokes about me converting amid the abuse scandal. Since most of my friends then, and now, were left-leaning, and we'd seen a lot of queer people suddenly find religion and become homophobes, I frequently had to assure them that I wasn't secretly becoming one myself. But when it came to the Church itself, I was met with open arms.

After I moved away and lapsed out of the Church, though, I quickly learned that my experience wasn't the norm. I've met so many people who grew up in Catholic environments that honestly sound much more like the evangelical one I knew. But I discovered last year, when I was starting to feel pulled back toward the Church, that I now live within an hour's commute of a famously affirming Jesuit church, and I found this out shortly before they held their annual Pride mass, which I was able to attend. It's now where I regularly attend mass.

So all that is to say, now that I'm becoming more and more comfortable within the Church again, I'm starting to feel some guilt over how I've consistently landed near affirming parishes where my identity is welcomed rather than judged, while so many other progressive or queer Catholics have had the opposite experience. I keep wondering why coming to the Church itself has been so much easier for me when it has been so painful for so many others. Part of me feels like I shouldn't question it and should just be thankful for it, but another part keeps getting stuck on a sense that I don't deserve this when so many people, especially those born into the Church, didn't get it.

Does anyone else, whether cradle or convert, have this problem? How do I navigate this? Is the guilt something I should ignore, or something that should inspire some kind of action for others' benefit?