«God loves your children» LGBT+. When Jonathan's tent met Pope Francis

Text by Nico Lang, published on the site Them.us (United States) on September 18, 2020. Freely translated by Gionata Project volunteers.

On Wednesday 16 September 2020, Francesco had met around 40 members of the Italian association La Tenda di Gionata, a support group for LGBTQ+ Christians and their families. The vice-president of the association, Mara Grassi, gave the pontiff a booklet that recounts the rejection that many of these families had experienced from the Catholic church.

Mara Grassi, whose eldest son is gay, explained to Francesco why the book was titled Lucky Parents.

“We consider ourselves lucky because we had to change the way we had always looked at our children,” he said, according to the account published by the newspaper The Republic (Italy) on 18 september 2020. «We have found a new look which allowed us to see the beauty and love of God in them."

«We wish to create a bridge with the Catholic Church so that the church can also change its way of looking at our children, no longer excluding them but welcoming them fully», he added.

Francis, who had often been praised for a more open approach to the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people than his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, responded to Mara with words of welcome and affection. “The church doesn't exclude them because it loves them deeply,” he told him.

Grassi then told a The Republic that he felt "very strong emotions" listening to those words, after having struggled for a long time to find a place for his family within a religion that had historically defined homosexuality as a "sin".

After participating in a prayer vigil for LGBTQ+ people in a church in northern Italy a few years earlier, she said she had finally found a community capable of welcoming her son for who he is.

"For many years I was like a blind person," Grassi said. "When I learned that my son was homosexual, I suffered a lot because the rules of the Catholic church made me think that he was excluded from the love of God. Nobody helped me."

The meeting represented one of the many moments in which Francis distanced himself from the Catholic Church's more rigid language towards LGBTQ+ people. Shortly after the beginning of his pontificate in 2013, answering a question about the presence of gay priests, he said: "Who am I to judge?", adding that LGBTQ+ people must not be marginalized, but integrated into society.

On other occasions, he said that Catholics should ask forgiveness from LGBTQ+ people for centuries of discrimination and, speaking to a gay man in 2018, he told him: "God loves you like this and made you like this."

At the same time, on his path towards greater openness, Francis had also shown controversial positions, in particular regarding trans people. He had called “gender theory” an “evil” and compared it to global threats such as nuclear war.

However, he had also written a letter of support to a nun who had opened a shelter for trans women in Argentina. “God will reward you,” he wrote to her.

* Nico Lang is an award-winning journalist and editor. He is a correspondent on LGBTQ+ issues for VICE and is a regular contributor to NBC News and Xtra. His articles have appeared in numerous newspapers, including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Guardian and The Washington Post.

Original text: Pope Francis Tells Parents of LGBTQ+ Kids: “God Loves Your Children”