 Others refuted Lynch with evidence that Judge did in fact identify himself as gay, both to others and in his personal journals.Judge was a long-term member of Dignity, a Catholic LGBT activist organization that advocates for change in the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality.On October 1, 1986, the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an encyclical, "On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons", which declared homosexuality to be a "strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil".