LGBT+ Jubilee Pilgrimage: Bishop Savino – “It’s not about hosting, but about recognizing that everyone already belongs here”
In Italy, the Gionata portal today, August 15, 2025, published a lengthy interview by Sara Spera with Francesco Savino, bishop of Cassano all’Jonio and vice president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, who has made closeness and welcome the heart of his pastoral ministry. Attentive to the least and to those who live on the margins, he is unafraid to remind us that the proclamation of the Gospel “begins with the faces, the stories, and the wounds of those who so often have no voice.”
With this spirit, Bishop Savino explains in the interview why he accepted the invitation from the association La Tenda di Gionata to preside, on September 6, 2025, at the Holy Mass in the Church of the Gesù in Rome—one of the central moments of the Jubilee Pilgrimage of “La Tenda di Gionata and other associations” with LGBT+ Christians, their families, and the pastoral workers who accompany them, as they journey toward passing through the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica.
Bishop Francesco Savino underscores:
“Celebrating Mass with La Tenda di Gionata and with all those who work for dignity and inclusion means embodying—in the living flesh of the community—the parable of the Good Samaritan. It means allowing oneself to be wounded by another’s suffering and loneliness, to bend down and bind up their wounds, and not to remain watching from a distance in the name of a purely ritual religion.
The Eucharist, in this sense, is a mother’s womb that welcomes, not a fenced yard that rejects; it is a home with doors always open, where the cornerstone is Love without conditions. It is in the meeting of faces and the sharing of bread that the Church rediscovers her original vocation: not to be a fortress for a few, but a tent for all, capable of dwelling in the peripheries of the soul and of history.
This is why this moment is not only a liturgical celebration: it is a prophetic act, a sign that proclaims to the world that in the Kingdom of God there are no ‘guests’ and ‘hosts.’ There are only sons and daughters, gathered at the same table, transformed by the one Love that saves.”
For him, celebrating alongside these groups is not merely a gesture of closeness, but a prophetic act:
“It means making visible and tangible what I firmly believe: that the Christian community safeguards a spring capable of quenching every thirst for hope, binding up every wound to dignity, extending a hand without asking for entry tickets, without erecting invisible walls of exclusion.
It is therefore not a matter of ‘hosting’ someone in the house of the Lord, but of recognizing that all are already rightful inhabitants. The Eucharist, at the heart of this celebration, thus becomes not the prize reserved for a few, but the bread of communion that restores the scattered human family. In this sign lies the prophecy of a Church that lives not to guard a temple, but to be a living temple: where every stone is a face, every column a story, and every door opens toward the infinite embrace of God.”
Asked how this Eucharistic celebration—with over a thousand LGBT+ Christians, their parents, and the priests and sisters who accompany them from around the world—can send a strong and clear signal of change, he responds:
“This event, in its deepest essence, is like a bell ringing out in the deafening silence of exclusions: a clear, strong, and irreversible sign reminding us that the Gospel is not a manifesto for a chosen few, but a love letter addressed to the whole human family.
Jesus, in his tireless walking along the dusty roads of Galilee, tore down every wall of belonging, healed wounds without asking for credentials, and sat at the table with sinners and strangers, showing that the Father’s love knows neither borders nor conditions.”
And it is precisely the image of the “tent” that will guide the celebration preceding the passage through the Holy Door at St. Peter’s. For Bishop Savino, this moment is:
“an invitation, gentle yet powerful, to let our hands imitate those of Christ, which never turned away anyone who came near, but instead reached out to touch the wounds of the world and turn them into openings for grace. And so, once again, the message is clear: in God’s heart, the peripheries become the center because there are only beloved children. And when the Church remembers this, heaven truly opens upon the earth.”
There are just over twenty days to go before the Jubilee Pilgrimage of La Tenda di Gionata with more than a thousand LGBT+ Christians, their families, and the pastoral workers who accompany them, arriving from every continent.
Each is preparing in their own way, but as the volunteers of La Tenda di Gionata remind us, “we are arriving together: with our fears, our questions, our desires. With the will to be there—for the first time or forever. It is more than an event. It is more than a journey. It is the feeling of being home.”
> To read the full interview in Italian, click here…
> Official information on the Jubilee Pilgrimage of “La Tenda di Gionata and other associations.”
