I think the anti-gay stuff happens definitely at the Bishop level, along with political action and donations to anti-equality legislation on the part of the Catholic church. Outside of that, you've got most of the mobilization happening outside of Mass. But there were very clear proclamations from the top down, starting with the Popes.

If you were in the pews on Sunday, you either had a priest that felt it was part of a message that bore repeating, or not. Most likely not though.

I have to say I was pretty disappointed at the beginning of my wedding Mass though. If you get married in a Catholic church they give you a little booklet where you can plan your Mass by selecting your choice of readings from the Bible at the various stages. These readings naturally draw from what the Bible has to say about the Wedding Sacrament, and the union of a man and a woman.

So having a gay sister who was going to be in the pews with her wife partner and their baby, we went through great pains to pour over the texts and select readings that didn't reference the union of only a man and a woman. Obviously this was hard to do, but we managed to find the texts with the vaguest language and cobble something together. If you were new to Christianity, you could be at the Mass and not come away with an understanding of what the church feels on the subject, so we were pretty pleased.

So come the day of the wedding, the family and friends are in the pews, my soon to be wife and I are at the alter, and the Monseigneur strides out and begins the entire Mass with an unscripted defense of traditional marriage, and then begins the actual Mass proper.

W. T. F.

I just remember feeling ashamed because my sister and her partner were sitting right there listening to it. They were raised Catholic too, -they get it and couldn't have been shocked, and in the grand scheme of things it probably wasn't a big deal, but it really did bother me and took me out of the moment and the reason I was up there in the first place. It's shit like this that I feel Francis is directly addressing when he talks of re-calibrating emphasis in the church.