On Being Almost In

I found out what “scandal” looks like from an Instagram algorithm.

It was a suggested post — an account I don’t follow, showing up in my feed the way these things do. An image of Pope Leo XIV, styled and lit like a movie poster, a pride flag caught in the wind behind him, rainbow ribbons tied to a cross. Underneath, in the kind of bold white type reserved for things that want to make you angry before you’ve finished reading them: Gay news site celebrates Pope Leo’s pro-LGBT appointments.

I sat with that image longer than I meant to. Not because it shocked me — I’ve seen enough of this kind of content to know its shape by now — but because of where I was sitting when I saw it. I was in the middle of my catechism reading. I am, as of this year, a catechumen: someone who has said yes to the Church before the Church has, in the sacramental sense, said yes back. I’m not baptized yet. I exist in that particular threshold space — inside enough to care deeply what happens in there, outside enough that every headline like this one lands with an extra weight, because it’s aimed, whether its authors know it or not, at whether people like me get to stay.

The post wasn’t really reporting anything. It was framing. Bishops who choose to sit with people the Church has spent decades pushing to its margins — that was recast as corruption, evidence of decline, a scandal to be exposed rather than a ministry to be understood. I left a comment, something like: giving care to vulnerable people is the actual point of a good pastor, and dressing that care up as scandal serves something else entirely. I don’t know if anyone who needed to read it did. That’s not really why I wrote it.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. I am not baptized. Canonically, formally, I am not yet a member of the thing these accounts claim to be defending. And I still felt that post as an attack — not on an abstraction called “LGBT ideology,” but on the actual, specific possibility of my own inclusion. That’s the part that’s hard to explain to people who’ve never stood where I’m standing. When you’re not yet in, every argument about who gets to belong is being had, in some sense, about you, without you in the room.

I think about the bishops named in posts like that one — the ones accused of the crime of pastoral care, of drafting guidelines that don’t make chastity a precondition for being spoken to like a human being, of letting someone’s grief or joy or presence into a church building without first litigating their soul. I don’t know most of these men personally. But I know what it is to be on the receiving end of that kind of accompaniment, in small ways, from people who never once made me feel like an exception they were tolerating. And I know what it is to watch that same accompaniment get turned into a headline meant to humiliate the person offering it.

There’s a version of Catholicism — the one in that staged photo, lit like a warning — that treats the Church as a fortress to be defended against people like me. And there’s the one I’m actually trying to walk into, slowly, through readings and questions and a catechist who has never once flinched at anything I’ve told her. Those two versions cannot both be the whole truth of this faith. I don’t think they’re even close.

I’m not writing this to relitigate a Vatican appointment I have no standing to weigh in on. I’m writing it because I noticed something about myself in that moment, scrolling past a manufactured outrage on a Tuesday afternoon: I am still, after everything, choosing to move toward this. Not the fortress. The other one. The one that reaches.

I don’t know yet what my baptism will feel like, or when it will come, or what the Church I’m formally received into will look like by then. But I know I’d rather spend my energy becoming part of the version that reaches toward people than spend it arguing with the version that stages outrage against them. That’s not naivety. It’s a choice I get to make every time a post like this one shows up in my feed, uninvited, asking me to be afraid of my own belonging.

So far, I keep choosing the same way.

— Anya