Although he has yet to make any unequivocally positive statements on trans people, Pope Francis did meet with some trans people this week.
At the weekly general audience held on August 9, the Pope met with a group of unhoused trans people who have been sheltering in a church outside Rome, according to the Vatican’s newspaper L’Osservatore Romano as reported by the Associated Press. The paper noted that the meeting was his fourth with trans people since April.
Members of the Blessed Immaculate Virgin church, located in the Torvaianica neighborhood of Rome, opened the church to trans people in need during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. During Easter last year, Pope Francis arranged for them to receive COVID vaccinations at the Vatican.
Sister Genevieve Jeanningros told the paper that the Pope’s attention has brought hope to the group. “No one should encounter injustice or be thrown away, [and] everyone has [the] dignity of being a child of God,” she said.
Pope Francis has long straddled the line, however, between supporting individual LGBTQ+ people and condemning their presence in the world. Though known for supporting gay civil unions as the archbishop of Buenos Aires prior to ascending to the papacy, Francis has held that the Catholic Church cannot bless gay marriages because they are still based in sin and “threaten the family.”
On trans issues, Francis has been more blunt, exhorting trans youth to “accept their own body as it was created” and infamously comparing “gender ideology” to nuclear weapons in 2015, insisting that trans people “disfigure” the face of God’s creation. (At least that one gave us some great art.)
Earlier this year, Francis sent a handwritten letter to a Jesuit-run group of LGBTQ+ Catholics called Outreach. In the letter, Francis said, “God is Father and he does not disown any of his children, adding that “the style” of God is “closeness, mercy and tenderness.”
We’re sure glad that at least some trans people can receive direct and material relief from the Pope, but on behalf of the rest of us, maybe lay off the anti-LGBTQ+ comments, your holiness?
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