Upper School history teacher James Nau expected little response to his January 28 Facebook post in which he objected to the refusal of Bishop Blanchet High School’s alumni magazine to run classmate Jessie Gifford’s same-sex marriage announcement. But he got a big one —  the post has been shared 156 times (and counting), and 229 people have liked it.

Nau learned about Gifford’s situation after she posted about it on January 27.  “It just stuck with me after that,” he said. “That night I laid in bed stewing on it — part of it was genuine concern for my friend, but part of it too was just I didn’t want the school to become this kind of place. It was anathema to my sense of the school.”

Nau and Gifford graduated from Blanchet in 1997 as class president and homecoming king and vice president and homecoming queen, respectively. Nau taught at Blanchet from 2003 to 2006 as well. Blanchet is a catholic high school.

“This policy which prohibits the public acknowledgement of Jessie’s marriage stands behind a faith that you no doubt believe is right, but it does so at the cost of what is greater: love,” Nau wrote in his post. “When there is an opportunity to rejoice in love that exists among the members of your community, you have chosen instead to shut them out, and on this issue Pope Francis has warned, ‘a Church with closed doors betrays herself and her mission.’”

In addition to posting the letter on Facebook, Nau sent it to Blanchet and the Archdiocese of Seattle. The Archdiocese has not responded, but Nau received what he called a “gracious” email from Blanchet’s principal on February 3.

Nau’s response to that email, which he also posted on Facebook and which more than 50 people have shared, reiterated his concerns and described his experience as “very alienating.”

These events, according to Nau, are part of a larger narrative of conflict between the Seattle Archdiocese’s liberal parishioners and conservative leadership. “This story is centered about the school, but it’s actually about the Archdiocese,” Nau said. “It’s their policy. My sense is that the school is trapped in the middle.”

That narrative featured heavily when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported on Nau’s post. (Kiro 7, NBC’s Seattle affiliate, also covered the controversy.) The article it ran about the situation pointed out that Seattle’s Catholic mayor had just married another man, that he could legally do so because a Washington’s Catholic governor had convinced the legislature to vote for marriage equality in 2012, and that students at a Catholic school near Blanchet had recently staged a walkout to protest the firing of an outed vice principal.

“They put more conservative Archbishops in by design because in the ’80s and ’90s there was this Archbishop named Hunthausen who was super progressive,” Nau said. “He opened up ministry to the gay community in the 1980s, and he also did other socially activist stuff, and the Vatican was concerned he’d gone too far, so there was a move to bring the Archdiocese back in a more conservative direction.”

When asked why Nau’s post became as popular as it did, Upper School English teacher Mike Mahany, who is Catholic, also mentioned intra-Catholic divisions.

“This was not someone from outside the Catholic Church attacking the Catholic Church,” Mahany said. “This was a Catholic who was taking on the Church. There are a lot of Catholics who feel the Church is way behind the times when it comes to an issue like this — faithful Catholics who support same-sex marriage, who feel like the Church is way too conservative on this issue.”

There are many such Catholics in Seattle, so Nau won’t be alone when he returns to the city —  if not necessarily its Archdiocese — next year in order to to teach at the Lakeside School. Perhaps some of them are among the dozens of people, some of whom he has no mutual friends with, who’ve sent Nau friend requests since he went viral.