The meeting with Pope Francis of four transgender women, a step towards healing from wounds

Article by Camillo Barone* Published on the website of National Catholic Reporter (United States) on September 26, 2024, freely translated by Luigi and Valeria de La Tenda di Gionata

Before meeting Pope John Paul II, twenty -four years ago, Mark Mogilka was panicked. As he went up the steps to greet the Pope, he thought of the secret he had never shared with anyone, except with his wife: being a transgender/bigering person.

"I remember that I was in total panic, because I am convinced that the Holy Father is a person full of the Holy Spirit who can see people's hearts," he said, remembering that day. "I had the nightmare that, when I had approached him to tighten his hand, he would have withdrawn him, because he would see what was in my heart, that is, that I was a transgender person and that I did not live a life in the truth and fullness according to Catholic doctrine".

At that point of his life, Mogilka was at the height of his forty years of sent -a -family experience in family and parish pastoral for the diocese of Green Bay, in Wisconsin (United States); For another nine years he has carried out pastoral activities in top positions in the diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Columbus, Ohio.

After spending more than ten years among the maximum experts in the United States for the definition of the guidelines of Catholic pastoral care on how to optimize the creation of connections, the merger, grouping and closing of the parishes, in 2017 Mogilka received the prize Louis J. Luzbetak, SVD, awarded annually by Research center applied to the apostolate of the University of Georgetown, "for the exemplary research applied to the Church and the service to the Church".

He therefore thought it was the right time to retire and finally live as a transgender/big hundred person, which he had kept hidden for almost sixty years, and identify himself as Martha Marvel.

Seven years later, Marvel and three other American Catholic transgender women briefly met Pope Francis. On September 18, each of them squeezed his hand and received a blessing, after introducing himself as "four transgender women who have always lived and worked in the Catholic Church".

Before going further on his wheelchair to meet and bless the other participants, Francesco said twice: "Pray for me". Meeting the Pope this time, Marvel said he felt "in peace in my relationship with God".

«The Pope represents God, the Holy Spirit, and I felt as if we were on the same wavelength. There was nothing to be afraid of. It was wonderful, "he told the National Catholic Reporter.

Marvel, Maureen Rasmussen, Christine Zuba and Lynn Discanza learned that they could meet the Pope in September when they participated in the August 2024 LGBTQ+ Ministry Outreach Conference. There they met Don Andrea Conocchia, an Italian priest of the Church of the Blessed Virgin Immacolata, a peripheral parish of Torvaianica, a small town outside Rome. The priest regularly accompanies the sex workers Transgender to public hearings and lunches with the Pope since 2020.

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy, a group of transsexual women asked for help to have something to eat after days of fasting. Conocchia opened them the doors of his parish, but when he realized that he did not have enough resources to help them, he wrote a letter to the Pope. A few hours later, the Pope made him know that he would send aid.

Since that day, the sex workers Transgender of Torvaianica wrote letters of thanks to the Pope who also highlighted their suffering and their life stories. In response, the Pope invited them several times to the Vatican for lunches and hearings.

On July 6th, Lilli, one sex workers Transgender of the community of Conocchia was found dead in a pine forest near the Torvaianica beach. Conocchia said his death shocked the local transgender community. Just last year, Lilli had met the Pope in the Vatican together with a group of companions of her community.

When Marvel, Rasmussen, Zuba and Discanza participated in the 2024 Outreach Conference, thanked with his work and his support activity for the Transgender community, and he had the idea of ​​inviting them to an hearing with Pope Francis. At the beginning the women had some hesitation, but then they accepted, thinking that this opportunity could be an important signal for the LGBTQ+ American Catholic community.

Two days before the meeting with the Pope, the women went to visit Torvaianica, where they met some of the sex workers That he supports, recited the rosary in his parish and made a donation to support the priest's pastoral work.

The four women did coming out With their families and friends as transgender women at sixty years old, when they started their respective paths of gender affirmation. They have always been practicing Catholics and, in the interviews issued a National Catholic Reporter, have declared that their identities of Catholic and transgender people are inseparable. Today they are active in the LGBTQ+ pastoral care in Wisconsin, Maryland, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Despite the results obtained in its pastoral activity in various dioceses, Marvel had to face a complex inner path for the discovery of its identity. Since he had grown up with three sisters, he had often warned the temptation to wear their clothes, but at the time "he had no language or guide to understand what he felt," he said. Only at the university discovered the term cross-dresser, who made her understand something, even if initially she was looking for a "cure" for what she perceived as a worrying obsession. Marvel, who describes himself as a "workaholic", had then immersed himself in the work to avoid dealing with what he warned internally.

Over time, Marvel recognized the need to be honest in his marriage. After thirteen years, he decided to reveal his transgender identity to his wife after a Halloween party in which she had dressed as a bearded woman. The discussion that followed was demanding: although he provided his wife a series of documents and tools to inquire and understand, it took nine months to elaborate the new situation. During this period, Marvel found themselves having to maintain a delicate balance between living like Martha and maintaining family life and parish activities like Mark.

“I was going through a great marriage crisis. Once someone asked me how I did to survive so long in diocesan pastoral activity and in work. I worked sixty hours a week. In part, this is due to the fact that I had a moment of discernment every year according to the exercises of Sant'Ignazio, in which I looked at the previous year and if I could tell myself that I was making the difference in the life of people and that I was improving the Church, then I knew that God was at the basis of all this and I could continue, "he said.

"It was a strange period and even today I do not live full time like Martha," he continued. «I live a life as a Bigennder person, and it is a matter of balance between my female energy and my male energy: if I spend too much time like Martha, my heart feels the desire to spend time like Mark; On the other hand, if too much time passes when Martha could not fully express herself, go out and socialize with others, I feel a weight on my heart, on my spirit ».

Since retired, Marvel has helped create support networks for transgender people. In 2017 he founded the TG/CD 1st Thursday Gathering, a monthly support group held at Napalese Lounge of Green Bay. The group, which counts on average twenty -five participants, has contacted more than three hundred transgender people and offers special events for spouses and partners. In addition, in 2022, Marvel gave birth to the Bay Area Trans Youth Alliance (Batya), which offers a safe space for young transgender, attracting even more than twenty participants per month.

Its activity also includes important public interventions and participation in educational programs. In 2023, Marvel organized the first year -end dance for LGBTQ+ students of the high schools of the Green Bay area, with eighty participants. He intervened in various institutions, including St. Norbert College and the Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, on issues related to the inclusion and support of LGBTQ+people.

Despite the challenges he had to face to reconcile his gender identity with his work and his life as a Catholic person, Marvel said that he continues to be strongly desired a positive relationship with his faith. Marvel is still married, has four children and eleven grandchildren.

Since he was a child, Maureen Rasmussen has also warned a profound dissonance between his body and his mind. "I probably was three or four years old, not more," he remembered, describing vivid dreams of being a girl and of rushing in the mother's clothes basket to find objects to wear. It was an experience that thrown her into confusion, especially when at ten years of age she was surprised with the skirt of her sister hidden under her pants. «I was terrified. I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't know how to solve that situation, "he said.

Her professional path led her to hold an important position in the marketing of the General ElectricThen he acquired a lighting company in Maryland, where, as former president and CEO, he still holds the role of strategic consultant.

While his professional life thrived, the inner struggle continued to weigh on her. The thought of buying female clothes terrified it, as well as the idea of ​​being discovered for what it really was.

"I was frightened to death," he said.

In the end Rasmussen married a woman in 1995. The turning point in the relationship with his wife took place during the Easter wake of 2013, when Rasmussen returned home and found that his wife felt his legs anymore - a sign of neuropathy linked to alcoholism that he had started to manifest himself.

The woman had drunk a lot for years and had undergone a series of falls and memory voids, pushing Rasmussen to attempt several therapeutic interventions that in the end everyone failed. In the following years, Rasmussen's wife worsened dramatically and died in July 2024.

At the same time, during those tragic years, Rasmussen's struggle began to emerge against his gender dysphoria. In an interview a National Catholic Reporter, recalled that at the beginning of 2015, on the return from a business trip to Key West, Florida, his life underwent a dramatic turn. For years, Rasmussen had secretly expressed his true identity, Maureen, during working trips, taking extra days to dress according to his gender identity and explore his inner perception. He began to warn intense physical symptoms: unbearable pain in the chest, sleepless nights and extreme weight loss.

A series of medical tests did not reveal any physical cause. At that time, with the help of a therapist, Rasmussen realized something that would have changed her life: if the origin of her suffering was not physical, perhaps she was deeply linked to her repressed gender dysphoria.

During all its path of gender affirmation, its Catholic faith remained a central pillar. He recalled the support that the priests provided them during the convalescence after the surgical interventions for the genre affirmation in a hospital in San Francisco, in particular the moment when a Jesuit priest came to his room, blessed him with Holy Oil, he listened to his history and gave her communion.

"The Eucharist is the center of my life," he said. «I was so in peace with my faith and with myself, with the person I have always known I was. There was incredible joy, and that light still shines today, a sense of joy that I don't think I have ever tried before. I think it will never go away. It is as if I had made it, I finally established a connection and God is right here with me ».

On September 16, two days before the meeting with Pope Francis, after greeted outside his parish, Discance whispered to the Rasmussen: "Maureen, can you believe it really happens?". "Yes," Rasmussen replied, "and I seem to be in paradise."

When Discanza met Pope Francis, he gave him a book containing a collection of life stories written by Catholics LGBTQ+ and by parents of LGBTQ+ people from his parish, St. Patrick-St. Anthony of Hartford, in Connecticut. Retired engineer and activist for LGBTQ+ people for over ten years, Discanza has dedicated himself to the support of the Catholic community queer, by establishing groups of mutual aid and intervening as a speaker to promote the understanding and acceptance of the LGBTQ+community.

In a personal letter that the four women wrote all together and handed over to the Pope through with a meeting before their meeting, Discanza retraced his entire life as a believer, telling how he spent more than a year in an Augustinian seminar when he was nineteen years old, his marriage and subsequent divorce, and his path of genre affirmation.

«I believe that God created me as I am and that the will of God for me is to be myself authenticly, to live the call to be the best version of myself. Not to hide myself and my gifts under the moggio. But to testify to the others, especially to Catholics, that as a transgender woman I was created in the image of God and loved by God for what God made me be », he wrote.

Discenza told National Catholic Reporter That in the "most painful" period of her life, that is, when her wife divorced and she could no longer ignore the need to affirm her gender identity, she had suicide thoughts. However, a long spiritual path undertaken with the reading of the book The crucified God Di Jurgen Moltmann helped her survive.

"People always ask me: 'Why do you stay in the Catholic Church?'. My conscience says it is good that I am close to God. There is no reason to escape. I consider myself just like the prophets. I am willing to accept criticism, and in the LGBTQ+ community I receive many for being in the Catholic Church. Somehow, all this seems right to me and I ask I can continue to be myself, "he said.

"A visit to the Pope, and the way in which all this happened, convinced me to be on the right path."

In the letter to the Pope, Christine Zuba, the fourth Catholic transgender woman of the group, mentioned the importance of the Ministry of Sister Louise Derouen, a nun of the Eucharistic missionaries of San Domenico who in the last twenty -five years has worked to promote greater inclusion of transgender people in the Catholic Church, reporting many transgender Catholics to the Church.

After Pope Francis Benedetto Zuba, she asked him to autograph his recent autobiographical book, Life, explaining that he would give him to Derouen.

He said to National Catholic Reporter To feel lucky for being invited to meet the Pope and defined the whole day "an absolutely wonderful experience". But he also expressed a certain disappointment for the fact that none of the participants had the opportunity to ask a direct question to Pope Francis. "I think that trying to make him say even a small positive thing about transgender people would have been a big step," he commented.

Zuba, a retired electric engineer of New Jersey, said his faith "blossomed" after his transition. He said he felt "reborn" and spiritually enriched, especially when he listens to positive messages on LGBTQ+ people by religious authorities. "Our Church has changed throughout history: this is certain, and it will continue to evolve, perhaps not to change, but to evolve, for the better," he said. "Please Pope Francis can understand that we too, like transgender people, have no choice: we are who God wanted us to be".

* Camillo Barone is a journalist of National Catholic Reporter.

Original text: 4 Trans Catholic Women Call Meeting Pope a Step Toward Healing and Inclusion.