“Being able to meet Francis as my true self, with no mask or false persona, was a privilege and a grace,” Kuzma wrote in the National Catholic Reporter about this experience. “I am proud of myself for telling him that I am transgender in his native language, and equally proud that the Catholic Church has a pope who responds so warmly and pastorally to the transgender members of his flock.”
The meeting was arranged by Italian priest Fr. Andrea Conocchia, who has previously brought groups of trans people to the Vatican. The group spoke briefly with Pope Francis and gifted him the book Trans Life and the Catholic Church Today (edited by theologians Nicolete Burbach and Lisa Sowle Cahill), along with personal letters from two of the group members. Pope Francis shook their hands, thanked them, and blessed them.
The group included George White and Br. Christian Matson, both trans men serving in Catholic ministries today. The National Catholic Reporter recently highlighted their stories in an article about the barriers trans Catholics face when seeking to join religious life.
White, a 30-year-old living in the United Kingdom, entered the Catholic Church at the age of 16 thanks to the support of staff at his Catholic secondary school. He told NCR that he felt called to priesthood as a Salesian of Don Bosco, a religious congregation focused on education.
NCR reported, “While responses from within the [Salesian] order have been supportive, they reflect the church’s current stance on transgender issues, leaving him to reconcile his calling with the reality of church policies.” Despite the barriers to entering religious life and priesthood, White lives his vocation by serving as a religion teacher at St. Paul’s Catholic School in Leicester, UK.
Br. Matson is a religious diocesan hermit from Lexington, Kentucky. As Bondings 2.0 previously reported, Matson was received by Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv., in 2021. In 2023, Matson renewed his vows for three years. He is believed to be the first openly transgender diocesan hermit in the history of the Catholic Church.
Prior to becoming a hermit, Matson tried to join the Jesuits. He went through a discernment process and spoke with several vocational directors between 2011 and 2018, who deemed him an “excellent” candidate, but ultimately rejected him due to “medical history” as a trans man.
NCR reported the story of another trans man, James Pawlowicz, who also discerned a vocation with the Jesuits. When Pawlowicz came out to his vocations director, “the response was a mixture of personal support and institutional rejection.”
Pawlowicz says that the director told him, “You have to be born a male and remain a male to join religious life at all.”
Canon lawyer Daniel Quinan explained that while each order is governed by its own constitution, religious congregations typically use traditional definitions of biological sex, rather than gender identity. Quinan reports that cases of transgender persons seeking to enter religious life have been rare, but are becoming more common.
An informal network of mutual support has sprung up among men discerning religious life over the past year. They fellowship monthly on Zoom and have met in person. Matson has become a contact person for these men, who have each undergone their own process of discernment and, in many cases, persecution.
Matson emphasizes the genuine love of the church that motivates these men. He told NCR:
“Instead of assuming that all of us are people who are out to undermine the church…people need to realize that we are there for the Eucharist…We’re there for Christ. This is why we’re in the church and why we’re not just going and making our entire lives about being trans. Our lives are all centered in Christ.”
Despite rejections, many of these men are finding ways to live their vocations. Matson has “found comfort in the idea that his identity as a religious brother was intrinsic to his being, a calling that could not be easily dismissed.”
Quinan believes that the principles of canon law set a framework for inclusion of transgender people in religious life, by insisting on a universal call to pursue holiness. If all Catholics share a “right and duty to discern a life dedicated to the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience,” then transgender Catholics share in that calling as well.
Quinan says, “I think admitting transgender persons to consecrated and religious life is certainly possible; but then we have to grapple with all of the concrete realities in each particular case, which may not be anywhere near as simple.”
The realities of transgender persons living and ministering within the Catholic Church today are fraught with barriers. Even with those difficulties, Kuzma celebrates the freedom he experienced when affirming his identity in his meeting with Pope Francis.
“I felt the Holy Spirit moving in Rome,” Kuzma reflects, “not just in the handshake of Francis but in the pilgrims filling the square and in the hopeful smiles of my transgender travel companions.”