Pope urged at LGBTQ meeting to reverse Catholic Church’s ban on gender-affirming care
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Pope Francis during his meeting with transgender Catholics and supporters at the Vatican on Oct 12.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis faced calls to overturn the Catholic Church’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender people on Oct 12 when he held talks with LGBTQ activists at the Vatican.
The 80-minute meeting, held privately at the guesthouse where the pontiff lives, included a Catholic sister who works with LGBTQ people, a member of the transgender community, and an American medical doctor who helps run a clinic providing gender-affirming hormonal care for adults.
“I really wanted to share with Pope Francis about the joy that I have being a transgender Catholic person,” Mr Michael Sennett, who took part in the meeting, told Reuters.
Mr Sennett, a transgender man from Boston, said he told the pontiff about “the joy that I get from hormone replacement therapy” and the surgery that he had that made him “feel comfortable in my body”.
The unusual encounter was not listed on the Vatican’s official agenda of the Pope’s meetings for the day.
The meeting with around a dozen LGBT activists comes six months after the Vatican’s doctrinal office firmly rejected gender-affirming care, saying it “risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception”.
LGBTQ groups sharply criticised the Vatican document and said the doctrinal office did not seek input from transgender people about their experiences before rejecting gender-affirming care.
“We expressed that as the Church makes policies in this area, that it’s very important to speak with transgender individuals,” said Dr Cynthia Herrick, an endocrinologist at a St Louis, Missouri, clinic who took part in the papal meeting.
“The Pope was very receptive,” said Dr Herrick. “He listened very empathetically. He also shared that he always wants to focus on the person, the well-being of the person.”
Pope Francis, who is 87, has been credited with leading the Catholic Church into taking a more welcoming approach towards the LGBTQ community, and has allowed priests to bless same-sex couples on a case-by-case basis.
But earlier in 2024, he also used a highly derogatory Italian term about LGBTQ people, for which the Vatican apologised on his behalf.
New Ways Ministry, a US-based advocacy group for LGBTQ Catholics, organised the Oct 12 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 asked Pope Francis for the event. The meeting “means that the Church is coming along, the Church is joining the modern era”, she said.
Sister Gramick’s work with LGBTQ Catholics has attracted the ire of Vatican and US Catholic officials for decades, including former pope Benedict XVI. But she has developed a correspondence with Pope Francis, who first welcomed her for a meeting at the Vatican in 2023.
The Vatican’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Oct 12 meeting. REUTERS
