Pope
Francis faced calls to overturn the Catholic Church’s ban on
gender-affirming care for transgender people on Saturday when he held
talks with LGBTQ activists at the Vatican.
The
80-minute meeting, held privately at the guesthouse where the pope
lives, included a Catholic sister who works with LGBTQ people, a member
of the transgender community, and a U.S. 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,” Michael Sennett, who took part in
the meeting, told Reuters.
Sennett,
a transgender man from Boston, said he told the pontiff 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”.
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 criticized 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 Cynthia Herrick,
an endocrinologist at a St. Louis, Missouri, clinic who took part in
the papal meeting.
“The
pope was very receptive,” said Herrick. “He listened very
empathetically. He also shared that he always wants to focus on the
person, the well-being of the person.”
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 this year he also “used” a highly
derogatory Italian term about LGBTQ people, for which the Vatican
apologised “on his behalf”.
New Ways Ministry, a U.S.-based advocacy group for LGBTQ Catholics, organised 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 asked Francis for the encounter.
The meeting “means that
the church is coming along, the church is joining the modern era,” she
said.
Gramick’s
work with LGBTQ Catholics has attracted the ire of Vatican and U.S.
Catholic officials for decades, including Pope Benedict XVI.
But she has
developed a correspondence with Francis, who first welcomed her for a
meeting at the Vatican last year.
The Vatican’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Saturday’s meeting.
