In a highly unusual private meeting at the Vatican on Oct. 13, Pope Francis met with LGBTQ+ Catholics to discuss the Catholic Church ban on gender-affirming care for trans people. Reuters was the sole news service to report the event which purportedly lasted 80 minutes and was not listed on the Vatican’s official agenda of Pope Francis’s meetings for that day.
Francis has faced numerous requests to overturn the ban. The talks with LGBTQ+ activists were held privately at the guesthouse where the pope lives. Among those in attendance were a Catholic nun who works with LGBTQ+ people, an American trans man and an American medical doctor who helps run a clinic providing gender-affirming care for adults.
“I really wanted to share with Pope Francis about the joy that I have being a transgender Catholic person,” Michael Sennett, who took part in the meeting, told Reuters.
Sennett, a trans man from Boston, said he told Pope Francis about “the joy that I get from hormone replacement therapy and the surgeries that I’ve had that make me feel comfortable in my body.”
Sennett said, “As a transgender Catholic, I really wanted to share my story with Pope Francis — because he’s so pastoral, and let him know, really illustrate that our stories are all different and give him another perspective to consider when the Church is talking about transgender people and gender.”
Sennett said of Francis, “”He was very pastoral, very interested in my story, and it was just a very welcoming atmosphere. I felt that he wanted to hear everything I had to say.”
Anti-trans document
This meeting with LGBTQ+ activists follows the Vatican’s doctrinal office rejecting gender-affirming care several months ago. The office, which is not the Pope himself, stated gender-affirming care “risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.”
In that April statement, the Vatican attacked gender-affirming surgery, surrogacy and gender theory as violations of human dignity. “Infinite Dignity,” a 20-page declaration was in process for five years. After substantial revision in recent months, it was approved March 25 by Pope Francis, who ordered its publication.
In “Infinite Dignity,” the Vatican repeated its rejection of “gender theory,” or the idea that one’s biological sex can change. It said God created man and woman as biologically different, separate beings, and said people must not tinker with that or try to “make oneself God.”
LGBTQ+ advocacy groups were highly critical of the document and that the doctrinal office did not seek input from transgender people about their experiences.
“We expressed that as the church makes policies in this area that it’s very important to speak with transgender individuals,” said Cynthia Herrick, an endocrinologist at a St. Louis, Missouri, clinic who took part in the papal meeting on Oct. 13.
Herrick told Reuters, “The Pope was very receptive. He listened very empathetically. He also shared that he always wants to focus on the person, the well-being of the person.”
As PGN has reported in recent years, Francis, now 87, has led the Catholic Church to welcome LGBTQ+ people, and has allowed priests to bless same-sex couples on “a case-by-case basis.” Francis also said last November that trans people can be baptized and be godparents.
In addition, Pope Francis has enacted punitive measures against American prelates who have pushed anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, accusing them of “disunity.”
Church moving forward, says activist nun
New Ways Ministry, a U.S.-based advocacy group for LGBTQ+ Catholics, organized Saturday’s event.
“The message really is that we need to listen to the experiences of transgender people,” said Sister Jeannine Gramick, the group’s co-founder, who had requested the meeting with Pope Francis. Gramick said that the meeting “means that the church is coming along, the church is joining the modern era.”
Gramick, whose work was rejected by the previous pope, Benedict XVI, has engaged in correspondence with Pope Francis, who first invited her for a meeting at the Vatican in 2023.