For Father’s Day, Paul Rimmer headed to a service at the centuries-old Gothic chapel that he liked to visit in Cambridge, England, this time bringing his son, Tristan, 9, with him.

Tristan was enjoying the service — staring at the ceiling in awe, laughing happily — when an usher approached. The boy was being disruptive, the usher said, and needed to leave.

When Mr. Rimmer explained that his son, who is autistic, was expressing his excitement by laughing and calling out, the usher was apologetic but unmoved.

After leaving, Mr. Rimmer sent a letter to the chapel’s leadership and posted it on Facebook, setting off a reaction that drew a public apology from the dean of chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, and an outpouring of support from families who had also felt discriminated against or stigmatized because of autism.

“I thought it would’ve gotten 50 or 60 likes,” Mr. Rimmer said about the letter in an interview. “And that would have been the end of it.”

Instead, thousands of people shared his letter, a reaction that Mr. Rimmer attributed in part to “a sense that church and church worship should be open to everyone, that a church is a universal place.”

In his letter to the Rev. Dr. Stephen Cherry, the dean of chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, Mr. Rimmer was scathing.

“My son might not be able to talk, but he knows perfectly well what is going on around him,” Mr. Rimmer wrote. “He isn’t even 10 years old and he knows that he is unwelcome. If only places like King’s College made it clear what kind of spectators were acceptable, my son wouldn’t be subjected to rejection, and the other people there, to his unpalatable presence.”

The post was shared thousands of times on Facebook and garnered thousands of comments, some invoking Jesus’s words in the Bible, “let the little children come to me.” Others recalled their own experiences of feeling scorned. Parents described “judgmental” glares they’d received while shopping, requests to “control your children,” and scoldings from members of church staff and congregants.

More than a quarter of autistic people and their families have been asked to leave a public place because of reasons related to autism, according to the National Autistic Society, a British advocacy group.

“For autistic people and their families, it’s probably almost a universal experience,” said Tom Purser, the head of campaigns for the group, which estimates there are about 700,000 autistic people in Britain.

“Our research showed that people feel unwelcome, they feel judged in public, people roll their eyes, they tut, they stare or make unhelpful or horrible comments,” Mr. Purser said.

Mr. Rimmer said that he and his wife have had similar experiences at movie theaters or concert venues in the United States and Britain. A parishioner at a Catholic church in London had once reprimanded him and his son, he said, only for a priest to interrupt and ask that person to leave.

Late Monday, Dr. Cherry apologized to Mr. Rimmer on Facebook and on his personal blog. He denied that he had given any instructions to expel the family and said he had been “devastated” to learn what had happened.

“Nonetheless as dean I do take responsibility for the whole life of the Chapel and in that regard I express my unreserved apology,” he wrote.

“Every week we welcome thousands of people to services in King’s Chapel and we do our best to meet all their various needs and expectations,” he wrote. “Sometimes we fail and I realize that we especially failed you and Tristan.”

He asked to meet with Mr. Rimmer, who agreed. Tamsin Starr, a spokeswoman for Cambridge University, declined to comment on how the chapel might “do better in the future,” as the dean wrote.

The dean’s response was a sign that institutions and those who run them are growing more accepting of people with autism, said Dorothy Siegel, a longtime special education advocate and the co-founder of the ASD Nest program, a project for autistic students in New York’s public schools. “It is more acceptable for people to be a little bit more different now,” Ms. Siegel said.

Another Facebook post that went viral last month, for instance, was about how an employee of Universal Orlando Resort had tried to comfort an autistic boy who had been disappointed by a broken ride.

“It’s not about always making sure that nothing ever goes wrong,” said Mr. Purser of the National Autistic Society. “It’s about when someone says, ‘My son’s autistic,’ then people know what that means, they’ve had some training and they know how to respond.”

Institutions could better accommodate people with autism, the advocates said. A minister could announce before a service that some people may become emotional or excited about the music, for instance, or organizations could invite people with autism to special events.

“There’s lots of ways to deal with this,” Ms. Siegel said. But getting angry at a child “and kicking him out is not one of them.”

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