As a lifelong homosexual and an ex-Catholic turned agnostic-atheist, I feel compelled to write that recent statements on the subject of homosexuality made by Pope Francis (Sept. 20) leave me unimpressed.

The pope’s insistence on compassion rather than condemnation in the matter is rooted in his conviction that gays are “wounded souls.” But what makes him think gays take kindly to being regarded as wounded (read: sick) because of their orientation — an orientation Catholicism regards as unnatural?

One primary reason I wound up throwing in the towel as a believer some years ago was because I found the struggle for total chastity to be a hopeless one — despite all the compassion I received from priests, despite all I did to avoid “the occasions of sin,” despite the whole Catholic kit and caboodle of ways and means for grappling with sexual temptation. I’d had it to here with all the failure and the guilt that inevitably ensued from it.

Nothing the pope has said on the matter could induce me to take up that unnatural, Sisyphean struggle yet again. As the Sept. 20 report made clear, his observations signal no change in church teaching. Behind all the soft-eyed talk of compassion looms the untouchable, inherently condemnatory teaching that homosexuality is unnatural, disordered, forbidden, evil, unchristian and an unmistakable impediment to eternal salvation.

If the teaching of two millennia doesn’t say exactly that, first and last, it doesn’t say squat.

The truth of the matter is that it is written in stone.

William LaRochelle, Lewiston