The Supreme head of the Roman Catholic Church; Pope Francis has met the fourth group of transgender people who found shelter at a Rome church.
The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said the meeting took place Wednesday. The newspaper quoted Sister Genevieve Jeanningros as saying the pope’s welcome brought their guests hope.
The Blessed Immaculate Virgin community in the Torvaianica neighbourhood on Rome’s outskirts opened its doors to transgender people during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Pope previously met some of them on April 27, June 22, and August 3, the newspaper said.
“No one should encounter injustice or be thrown away, everyone has the dignity of being a child of God,” Sister Jeanningros told the paper.
Francis has earned praise from some members of the LGBTQ community for his outreach. When asked in 2013 about a purportedly gay priest, he replied, “Who am I to judge?” He has met individually and in groups with transgender people over the course of his pontificate.
But he has strongly opposed “gender theory” and has not changed church teaching that holds that homos*xual acts are “intrinsically disordered”.
In 2021, he allowed the publication of a Vatican document asserting that the Catholic Church cannot bless same-s*x unions since “God cannot bless sin”.
Recently, Francis wrote a letter praising the initiative of a Jesuit-run ministry for LGBTQ Catholics, called Outreach. The Pope recently praised a recent Outreach event at New York’s Jesuit-run Fordham University, and encouraged organizers “to keep working in the culture of encounter, which shortens the distances and enriches us with differences, in the same manner of Jesus, who made himself close to everyone”.
