Invited by Popes Leo and Francis, 1,200 LGBT Catholics Cross St. Peter’s Holy Door

A milestone once unimaginable: LGBT Catholics process through the Holy Door with papal blessing.

LGBT Catholics are in Rome this week to do something that would’ve seemed impossible a decade ago: pass through St. Peter’s Holy Door together during the Jubilee Year.

The invitation didn’t come from activists.

Pope Francis green-lit the pilgrimage by ensuring it appeared on the official Jubilee calendar; Pope Leo has followed by signaling welcome — meeting LGBT champion Fr. James Martin and privately backing the event — while greeting LGBT pilgrims at his general audience.

The message is plain: come. This moment sits on a long arc.

When Francis began in 2013, his “Who am I to judge?” comment cracked a window in a sealed room.

Over time, he widened it: in December 2023, the Vatican’s doctrine office issued Fiducia Supplicans, allowing priests to offer non-ritual blessings to people in same-sex relationships — without changing Catholic teaching on marriage.

Francis defended that decision even amid global pushback. The core signal was pastoral: God’s mercy is not a gated community

Leo XIV is presenting himself as continuity, not rupture. Days before the pilgrimage, he received Fr. Martin for a half-hour audience; Martin emerged saying Leo intends to continue Francis’s posture of welcome.

In July, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández — Leo’s doctrine chief — said the same-sex blessings permitted under Francis “will remain,” providing the clearest public indication of policy continuity to date.

And while Leo’s style is more reserved, he has already acknowledged and encouraged LGBT ministry in ways that matter symbolically and pastorally.

The pilgrimage itself is no fringe happening.

1200 LGBT Catholics prayed a vigil at the Jesuit Church of the Gesù, celebrated Mass, and then processed to the basilica to cross the threshold together — a first-of-its-kind, Vatican-listed Jubilee event that tests whether the welcome on paper translates to welcome in the square.

Whatever one’s beliefs, that’s news.

None of this resolves the tensions — doctrine hasn’t shifted, and resistance remains.

But it does mark where the Church is moving under Leo: slow, public, pastoral steps that keep the door open rather than slamming it shut.

In a Holy Year themed Pilgrims of Hope, LGBT Catholics walking through the Holy Door isn’t an endpoint. It’s a mile marker — toward a Church that refuses to deny the face of Christ in anyone who shows up at the threshold.

Letters from Leo exists for moments like this — when the Church opens its doors and fulfills the late Pope Francis’s dream of a church open to “todos, todos, todos.”

Today, that means highlighting LGBT Catholics processing through St. Peter’s Holy Door during the Jubilee — at the invitation of both Pope Francis and Pope Leo.

Mercy and inclusion aren’t peripheral issues; they are the heart of Christian witness.

Our work is to keep that witness alive after the photos fade: to report clearly, track how this welcome shows up in parishes, and watch how the Church under Leo XIV walks with people long pushed to the margins.

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Whether you give $1, $10, $1,000, or simply read, I’m grateful you’re here.

I’ll see you on the road soon.