Pope Francis met a group of transsexuals in the Vatican this week, the fourth such encounter so far this year, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano reports.
“The pope’s attention to people who live this fragility with great suffering is opening up unimaginable hopes,” said Sister Geneviève Jeanningros and Father Andrea Conocchia, a priest and religious sister who offer pastoral care for the group.
“If this is not a revolution, what is?!” said Father Conocchia. “The pope who grants an audience to transsexuals, addressing them with love, paternity, and simplicity is not a foregone conclusion.”
“The Gospel relaunches us, tells us to welcome everyone, especially those who are most in need and who are marginalized out of prejudice,” the Vatican newspaper added.
Sister Jeanningros declared that nobody “should suffer the injustice of being discarded, since every person has in himself the dignity of a child of God.”
Commenting on the audience, the pro-LGBT magazine The Advocate praised Francis for “showing more support for LGBTQ+ rights than his predecessors,” but slammed him for his insistence on the biological distinction between men and women. In 2020, Pope Francis denounced the “evil” of gender theory, saying it seeks to erase the differences between men and women.
Gender theory is “dangerous,” the pope said in an interview later published as a book, because it implicitly wishes “to destroy at the root that creative project that God wanted for each of us — diversity and distinction — by making everything homogeneous and neutral.”
“It is an attack on difference, on God’s creativity, on man and woman,” Francis said. “If I say this clearly, it is not to discriminate against anyone, but simply to warn everyone of the temptation of falling into the foolish project of the inhabitants of Babel: doing away with differences to seek a single language, a single form, a single people.”