Lorenzo's journey to being gay and Catholic

Lorenzo's testimony Taken from the book edited by Elisa Belotti*,I trust you. Listening to LGBT+ Christian people and their parents, published by Jonathan's tent, March 2026, pp.14-17

I went from despair at having seen a future that seemed so certain collapse to the belief that this was an opportunity...

Today I am 24 years old but to tell this story I have to go back at least to when I was 19. I was in the fifth year of high school and I had been undergoing a process of discernment for at least a year to enter the seminary. I had been working on my vocation for some time, following all the steps laid out. I had done Ignatian spiritual exercises, for example, in which I discussed my sexual orientation with my spiritual father – the vicar of the diocese.

I told him I was gay and we talked about it, we approached it as a topic like all the others, integrated into my path but without considering it a problem or an obstacle.

I arrived at this choice to become a priest little by little, along a path of distance and closeness with the Catholic Church. I grew up in Sicily, substantially outside of parochial environments.

My parents took me away from catechesis when I was still a child, because they believed that it was better to live a journey of faith when we were older, when we had more tools. And we are talking about believing parents. Mine has always been a Christian family where the Gospel is read. Yet they had had a very difficult church experience, probably marked by violence, although I never knew the details.

Consequently, when they learned of my desire to participate in the life of the diocese first and then to become a priest, they expressed a certain disagreement. They saw it as going to the slaughterhouse, limiting myself in life's potential, not asserting myself to the fullest of my abilities. They were also hesitant because of my sexual orientation.

I realized i was gay during middle school. my family Was very calm about this, but feared that, in light of widespread homophobia, i would have bad experiences, both in society and in the catholic church. And indeed that was the case.

When I was still living in Sicily they outed me¹ and within a few days the whole village where I lived knew about it. Then, during our middle school years, we moved to Liguria.

Here I did not suffer physical but psychological discrimination. Those who knew looked at me as if I had an illness. The priest of my parish continually told me that I had to stay calm because I would return to heterosexual thoughts, which was a phase caused by my sexuality not fully maturing. There is still a lot of ignorance about how identity and sexuality work and there is a lack of structured training, especially aimed at priests.

As soon as I arrived in Liguria, however, I immediately looked for a choir, because I loved singing. They advised me to speak to the director of opera singing who also managed the parish choir next to my house. I met him to get to know him and then stopped at mass. It was the Palm Vigil.

I remember it precisely because from that moment on I began to frequent the parish and then the diocese assiduously. I went to mass every Sunday, I volunteered, I was very busy... so much so that I decided to dedicate my life to the Catholic church by becoming a priest. And everything seemed settled.

The situation was reversed a week after I entered the seminary. All the people around me knew about my life choice, the path was mapped out... it seemed practically certain.

At that moment I clashed with the bishop of my diocese and the rector of the seminary. It was a sudden impact, terrifying, I dare say. There were two hours of conversation where I had members of the clergy in front of me who were convinced that homosexuality was wrong, obscene, pathological.

I suffered real psychological violence. I was harassed with intimate and insistent questions about my sexuality, looking for some perversion, something dirty, ugly.

I grew up in that diocese, very traditionalist, so I was aware of living in a church that was not very sensitive to these issues. Up until that moment, however, everything had been reduced to "It's just a phase", also because I wasn't the only homosexual boy in the Catholic church.

In particular i remember a classmate of mine, active in the parish like Me. we spent the weekend together going around the churches of the diocese, engaged in various Services. he remained convinced that being gay was a problem, almost an illness.

During that conversation with the rector of the seminary i felt as if it were really my fault, as if i had lost my way and was experiencing something demonic. I was even offered a course with a psychologist chosen by the seminar to evaluate how rooted homosexuality was in me. It was, covertly, a process of conversion therapies.

Luckily my spiritual father, who knew that environment well, advised me against it and I never undertook it. I was heavily judged for my sexual orientation and made vulnerable through overly intimate and personal questions. I came away disconcerted. It took me a week in bed to recover.

During those days I was looking online for churches that could really respond in a welcoming and intelligent way to what I brought with me... to my sexual orientation yes, but to my identity more generally.

By chance I came across the website La Tenda di Gionata and i noticed the “I trust you” section. I immediately decided to write and tell my story. After a few days the answer arrived.

Innocenzo Pontillo he put me in touch with father Pino Piva² e Paolo Spina³, another volunteer of the association who had a similar experience to mine.

Paolo was of great help to me from the point of view of emotional support. It gave me comfort, support… presence. Father Pino Piva helped me understand that being rejected by the seminary was ultimately not negative, but a salvation.

It was not easy to develop this awareness. I was truly two steps away from a new life that I had desired and imagined. Furthermore, I found myself without a plan B. My whole life was based on entering the seminary. I hadn't enrolled in university, I didn't have a connection to a job. Nothing.

Yet, working on myself and this difficult moment, I went from despair to the belief that this was an opportunity. It was as if God knew that seminary wasn't for me… that I would find more violence and judgment. As if he wanted to save me and introduce me to another way of living and expressing myself.

And that's what i experience today.

I have become volunteer for “I trust you” and I am committed to local level and national so that the Catholic Church truly belongs to Christ and not to a traditionalist ideology that believes itself to be more important than the hearts of the people it encounters.

I moved. I changed city. I have taken up new paths. Almost by chance I moved to Florence and I started studying again. I enrolled at university and in 2025 I graduated in History with a thesis on how patriarchy developed in the Catholic church and on how twentieth-century feminist theology questioned this system.

Today I continue to study, I attend the master's degree... and little by little I have put the pieces back together. And now I hold the reins of my life in my hands.

_____

* Elisa Belotti is a journalist and teacher, she deals with human rights and marginalized communities, with particular attention to the impact of religion on society. ForThe Revue, wrote comic investigations on religion class at school, violence against religious women and womenconversion therapies. She is the author ofWithout mills,A newsletter on Christianity around the world.

[1] Coming out is a person's free choice to reveal their identity. Outing, on the other hand, is the forced and non-consensual revelation of another's identity by a third party.
[2] Giuseppe (Pino) ​​Piva is a Jesuit who has been accompanying LGBTQ+ people on various paths of personal, spiritual and ecclesial integration for years.
[3] Paolo Spina is a doctor, passionate about Sacred Scripture and feminist and queer theology. Graduated in Religious Sciences, he collaborates with the LGBTQ+ Christian Project and with La Tenda di Gionata.