@kel Oh, definitely.

@gzt And Greek Orthodox, hm? That ought to interest my counterpart @mona. She (well, her male counterpart) would have maybe preferred an Orthodox church to the Roman when she converted many years ago, but she felt that she would have been out of place in an Orthodox church because they've all got strong ethnic or national identities whereas the Catholic church is, well, catholic. But that was a long time ago now.

@kel @mona Yeah, I mean, the feel of it varies depending on where you are, in a lot of places the national identity thing doesn't play into it and it's universal.

Currently in the #Orthodox world, there's a lot of nonsense going around as well, which contributed. So a popular Russian nun wrote a blog post advising somebody whose 14 yr old son came out. Now, it's non-affirming, as the official Church position is, but it was about as good as that can get: love your son unconditionally, if he wants to date you should let him do so openly and even have him over for dinner, love your kid and let him make his own choices. Of course, tons of people exploded over this with decidedly un-helpful and un-compassionate responses. Who wants to deal with that noise?!

Of course, I must throw in the boilerplate here that I assent to all the teachings of the Church on faith and morals etc etc lest anybody fall across what I say and misconstrue its contents and accuse me of heresy or something and write a letter to somebody which will promptly be ignored; I do take issue with pastoral applications of the teachings and with certain assholes within the Church.

Because, of course, I do.