To the Journal editor:

It was with a great deal of interest — and sorrow — that I read Lisa Bowers’ April 10 front-page article “Confirmed Divide” in the Marquette Mining Journal.

As a life-long practicing Catholic, I will be the first to admit my profound sadness that it is my Church that has been sowing seeds of division through its edicts of religious exclusion at one of the most dangerous times in our nation’s history.

So many of us are left wondering what is going on with the leadership of our Catholic Diocese of Marquette by openly and publicly condemning gays, transgenders, family loving married couples who are “on the pill,” non-Catholics and so many other just normal wonderful people to hell.

It has been such a moral challenge being a Catholic for me and so many others due to our clergy’s open “holier than thou” exclusion of so many loving human beings.

At a time when so many Catholics have questioned their faith in their religion — at a time when we sadly witness the now empty pews within our parishes churches — it is so incredibly puzzling to me why our bishop and others would pick this date and time in our history to publicly pound nails in the lid of the coffin of our much needed recent attempts to focus on the true meaning of Christianity itself.

Now more ever is the time for us not to cast stones at those who are sadly being called out by our church leadership as “non-worthy” sinners. Banishing so many of the innocent from our parochial schools and from receiving the sacraments is not what Jesus called his followers to do.

Instead, we must be doing all that we can to spread the love and the open-heart-and-soul forgiveness of Jesus Christ upon all fellow human beings.

Once again, I am left with the same worries about the future, as do so many others who have recently left the Catholic Church, that some of the leaders within our own clergy may be the ones who are guiding us down that very road that Jesus warned us against traveling.

We are left today still searching for that faith, hope and charity as we continue to seek to live in a world made up of non-judgmental fellow human beings who truly do love one another as they do themselves.

Amen.