A recent CBS news segment chronicles the journeys of openly-gay bishops within the Episcopal Church. The story centers around trailblazer Bishop Gene Robinson (consecrated in 2003), and also spotlights Jeffrey Mello ’00MSW, who became Bishop Diocesan in the Episcopal Church in Connecticut in 2022.
As Mello conveyed to CBS, “I was never told, ‘If you’re gay, it’s gonna be okay,’ . . . But I heard over and over and over again — ‘God loves you.’ My relationship with God is what got me through it all. And that’s my greatest concern right now, when you say, are we tired of talking about our sexuality? I’m tired of it until I remember that there are still kids out there whose lives are being saved because they’re seeing people who are living their lives openly.”