Pope hears testimonies from transgender and intersex Catholics

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis met with a group of transgender and intersex Catholics, along with LGBTQ+ allies and a medical doctor specializing in transgender healthcare, during a nearly 90-minute audience at his residence, the Domus Sanctae Marthae.

According to an Oct. 12 press release from New Ways Ministry, a Catholic outreach initiative that advocates for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in the church and society, the meeting was organized by Loretto Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder of the ministry, who has been advocating for LGBTQ+ inclusivity in the Catholic Church for over 50 years.

Among the 11 Catholics who met with the pope, five offered personal testimonies of their experiences living as or working with intersex and transgender individuals.

Michael Sennett, a transgender man and member of New Ways Ministry’s board of directors, told the pope that at the age of eight he was chastised by a priest for asking to wear a suit during his first Communion rather than a dress. “I cried because I was convinced God hated me,” he said. After a suicide attempt at 17, he said a Catholic, lesbian nurse shared her story with him and led him to think “it wasn’t impossible to be myself.”

Nicole Santamaria, an intersex woman from El Salvador, said that “intersex or hermaphrodite people are made most invisible, even within the LGBT community,” despite being more prevalent in society than people realize. Although academic studies remain disputed, a widely cited figure reached using a broad definition of “intersex” estimated that about 1.7% of babies are born intersex.

Santamaria said her own experience of intersexuality and her Catholic faith inform her work with transgender and intersex people, since “God put me at the service of what is believed to be non-existent, of the despised, of the condemned, of the mystery.”

Deacon Ray Dever, a retired Catholic deacon and father of an adult transgender woman, told the pope that through his daughter’s experience his family “learned that there simply is no connection between gender theory and transgender individuals” since gender dysphoria “is not a personal choice or the result of some ideology.”

He said that such confusion leads to transgender people being excluded from the life of the church in many dioceses and parishes, denied sacraments and turned away from Catholic schools. Deacon Dever said by raising a transgender daughter he noticed a “stunning lack of compassion within so much of the church for transgender people.”

“It pains me to say this, but right now I think that we as a church are doing more harm than good in our approach to gender theory and transgender individuals,” he said.

In March, Pope Francis called gender theory an “ugly ideology of our time, which erases differences and makes everything equal.”

Pope Francis met previously with Sister Gramick at the Vatican in 2023 following two years of written correspondence between them beginning in 2021.

She previously had been investigated by the U.S. bishops and by the Vatican. In 1999, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a notice barring Sister Gramick and New Ways co-founder Salvatorian Father Robert Nugent from further pastoral ministry to homosexuals, saying they advanced “doctrinally unacceptable” positions “regarding the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts and the objective disorder of the homosexual inclination.”

With Pope Francis’ approval, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in April published a declaration, “Dignitas Infinita” (“Infinite Dignity”), which denounced discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and particularly situations in which people are “imprisoned, tortured and even deprived of the good of life solely because of their sexual orientation.”

But it also condemned “gender theory” as “extremely dangerous since it cancels differences in its claim to make everyone equal” and warned that sex-change interventions risk “threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.”