Vatican registers Italian LGBTQ+ group for Holy Year pilgrimage

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — An Italian association for LGBTQ+ Christians, their parents and the priests and religious who minister with them is among the many groups registered to make a pilgrimage together through the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.

Dioceses, parishes, Catholic organizations and prayer groups who register and reserve a time to make a pilgrimage during the Jubilee 2025 are listed on the “general calendar” of the Vatican’s official jubilee website.

The website, www.iubilaeum2025.va, indicates whether the pilgrimage is officially sponsored by the Vatican as part of the Jubilee.

In the case of the Catholic LGBTQ group “La Tenda di Gionata” (“Jonathan’s Tent”), the reservation for Sept. 6 at 3 p.m. was listed simply as a “pilgrimage” and not as “sponsored.”

But it disappeared from the calendar Dec. 13 after the group invited “all associations and groups dedicated to supporting LGBT+ individuals and their families to join us.”

Agnese Palmucci, the communications director for the Jubilee, told Catholic News Service Dec. 13 that the Vatican was in touch with La Tenda di Gionata and would return the pilgrimage to the calendar as soon as they had updated information about the number of pilgrims expected and the planned program.

Crossing the threshold of the Holy Door is traditionally the culmination of a pilgrim’s journey of prayer and conversion during a Holy Year.

In his bull of indiction officially proclaiming the Holy Year, Pope Francis wrote, “Now the time has come for a new Jubilee, when once more the Holy Door will be flung open to invite everyone to an intense experience of the love of God that awakens in hearts the sure hope of salvation in Christ.”

The jubilee celebration of La Tenda di Gionata and hundreds of other groups are not part of the Vatican’s 35 official, special jubilees for different groups, including communicators, priests, bishops, choirs, catechists, adolescents, young adults, families and even “digital missionaries and Catholic influencers,” who will be in Rome July 28-29.

Throughout his pontificate Pope Francis has met with and given encouragement to dozens of members of the LGBTQ+ community and with priests and religious who minister with them.

In April the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the approval of Pope Francis 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 the document 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.”