Monday, April 28, 2025

SojoMail - Pope Francis knew I belonged

In this week’s SojoMail: the fight for spiritual freedom behind bars, Joan Didion’s search for truth in American mythmaking, and how Pope Francis’ radical inclusivity still resonates.

Pope Francis Knew I Belonged

In this week's SojoMail, Jim McDermott writes that he spent his life feeling like the Catholic Church was an awkward fit for LGBTQ+ folks like him. Then came Pope Francis:

When Pope Francis’ condition first began to worsen in February, I found myself suddenly feeling the kind of vertiginous paradigm shift usually reserved for the loss of close family or friends, that sense of a curtain being torn aside and a truth being revealed. The detail that really broke me was the news that as he had gotten sicker, Francis continued to text and call the people of Holy Family Parish in Gaza.

It was so far beyond what anyone would expect of a critically ill 88-year-old man. And yet it crystallized for me what has been so personally important about Pope Francis: his dedication to welcoming those on the margins. Francis was the pope who spent his first Holy Thursday washing the feet of prisoners, including women and non-Christians, and continued his visits throughout his papacy. He is the pope who turned a Vatican palazzo into a homeless shelter, the pope who shared meals with sex workers, and did so as a matter of course. That’s what a pope — what a pastor — should do.

When Pope Francis was elected in 2013, I had been a Jesuit for almost 21 years, a priest for nearly 10. And for about 19 of those years, I had been learning how to accept and appreciate my sexual identity as a chaste gay man. Ten years in the priesthood had brought with it the ongoing challenge of working in an environment where you were expected never to reveal or share about your experiences of God as a gay or bisexual man, a challenge made enormously difficult at times by the horrendous mistreatment of queer people — including gay and bisexual priests — by some Catholic clergy and prelates.

Still, I thought I was managing it pretty well. I had learned to appreciate my identity as a blessing that God had given me, something that helped me see and relate to the world in a different way, rather than something deviant or sinful, so I saw myself as someone who could be there for LGBTQ+ Catholics. I could offer care and understanding, as many other priests, sisters, and brothers do.

Then Francis held his first on-plane press conference and said, with regard to queer people, “Who am I to judge?”

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