NEW: Transgender Activists to Dine with Pope Leo XIV during Sunday's Jubilee for the Poor

Papal luncheon with trans advocate Alessia Nobile set for Sunday at Vatican’s Jubilee of the Poor, highlighting a legacy of outreach and hopes for continued inclusion.

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Pope Leo XIV will meet and dine in a group setting with Alessia Nobile, a transgender Catholic activist from Bari, during a special lunch at the Vatican this Sunday, November 16.

The encounter will take place as part of the Church’s Jubilee of the Poor, an event coinciding with the World Day of the Poor that includes Mass and a communal meal with those in need.

Nobile, 46, has confirmed that she and four other transgender women were invited to the luncheon after she formally requested an audience with the new pope, motivated by her concern that the Church might “turn back on LGBTQ rights” after the death of her friend, Pope Francis.

The upcoming meeting — unprecedented in placing a transgender advocate at the pope’s luncheon — is seen as a continuation of Pope Francis’s legacy of outreach to marginalized people, and Nobile hopes it will reassure the LGBTQ community of the Vatican’s commitment to inclusion and dialogue.

A Faith Journey Marked by Rejection and Resilience

Alessia Nobile’s path in the Church has been difficult.

“I felt rejected by the Church and I was even subjected to an exorcism,” Nobile has recounted of her younger years.

As a teenager, she endured attempts by a high school religion teacher to “drive out” her perceived femininity — secret exorcism rites in a school basement — after the teacher intuited that Nobile was transgender.

The same instructor even urged Nobile’s family to consider electroshock therapy to “cure” her identity. Such traumatic experiences left Nobile alienated from local parish communities and on the margins of her faith for years.

Yet Nobile, who later earned a degree in social sciences and became an author and activist, never abandoned her Catholic faith.

In her memoir La bambina invisibile (“The Invisible Child”), she chronicled her story of isolation and longing for acceptance.

“We are what we are, and we are all made in God’s image,” she has emphasized, pushing back against the prejudice she faced. Despite feeling unwelcome in many parishes, she continued to pray and to seek a place in the Church. That persistence led her, in time, to an extraordinary friendship with the pope himself.

Friendship with Pope Francis: “He Was a Father to Us”

Nobile’s fortunes began to change under Pope Francis, who became a personal ally and spiritual father figure to her.

She first met Francis in June 2022 at a Vatican audience that Francis arranged to welcome Nobile and five other transgender women.

Francis’s approach was pastoral and deeply personal: he insisted she not kneel before him and instead clasped her hand warmly.

“When I introduced myself as a transgender woman, he replied: ‘That doesn’t matter. Tell me your name,’” Nobile recalled of that meeting.

She gave Francis a copy of her book about her life, and he encouraged her: “You did well to write your story... Go always with your head high!”

From that encounter grew a lasting friendship. Francis would invite Nobile to his public General Audiences, ensuring she sat in the front row at papal events.

“He wanted to see me in the front row at the audiences and liturgical celebrations,” Nobile told La Stampa, noting that the pope — aware she traveled from Bari each time — would playfully tease her about the journey.

Nobile met Francis at least three times. Eah time, he repeatedly urged her to share her experience openly: “You must tell your story, because if you don’t, prejudice grows. Don’t introduce yourself by saying ‘I am trans’; present yourself with your name,” Francis advised, encouraging her to help others understand her reality.

In July 2022, moved by Nobile’s witness, Pope Francis penned a handwritten letter to her that powerfully affirmed God’s love for all.

“In the eyes of God, we are all His children, and that is what counts!” Francis wrote, addressing Nobile as “Dear sister.”

“We have a Father who loves us, who is close [to us] with compassion and tenderness. To everyone, no one excluded. This is precisely God’s style: closeness, compassion, tenderness.”

The pope’s letter, with its message of unconditional divine love, left Nobile in tears of joy.

She later said receiving such words of hope and support from the head of the Church was “something unique, unrepeatable,” giving her courage to continue her advocacy.

When Pope Francis died earlier this year, Nobile mourned him as a mentor and friend. She joined other transgender women in traveling to Rome for his funeral on April 26, standing vigil in St. Peter’s Square the night before.

“He was a father to us, he was always by our side,” Nobile said, paying tribute to the pontiff who had “taken to heart the fate of so many of my sisters.”

At Pope Francis’s funeral Mass, Nobile was given a spot of honor near the front — a symbol of how far her relationship with the Church had come.

Sister Geneviève Jeanningros, the French nun who first helped arrange Nobile’s audience with Francis, consoled her at the funeral with a gentle promise: “Alessia, don’t worry, it’s not over. It won’t end here.”

Jeanningrose was a close personal friend of the late Holy Father and went viral after breaking protocol to keep watch over the late pope’s body during April’s visitation in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Hopes and Concerns as Pope Leo XIV Takes the Helm

In the wake of Francis’s passing, Alessia Nobile has looked to Pope Leo XIV – who was elected in the subsequent conclave – with a mix of hope and urgency. Leo XIV (born Cardinal Robert Prevost) has inherited Francis’s inclusive ethos, but also the expectations of diverse Catholic constituencies.

Nobile wasted little time in seeking dialogue: she formally wrote to Leo XIV requesting a private audience, driven by her “fear that the Church could go backwards” on LGBTQ inclusion without Francis’s guiding hand.

In late October, Italy’s bishops had approved a landmark synodal report calling on local churches to “overcom[e] discriminatory attitudes” and “promot[e] the recognition and accompaniment of homosexual and transgender persons”, among other pastoral reforms.

While hailed by many as a hopeful sign, the document also stirred controversy and resistance in some quarters.

Nobile has voiced concern that without strong papal support, such progress could stall or even be rolled back. “I ask Leo not to go backwards on rights,” she said in an interview, urging the new pope to affirm the inclusive trajectory set under Francis.

In a candid La Stampa interview on November 8, Nobile outlined what she hopes to hear from Leo XIV.

Channeling the memory of Francis, she said she would ask the new pontiff: “I am a friend of Francis — will you be the father of all of us transgender children?”

Pope Francis, she noted, often told her and other trans Catholics, “I am not just the pope for all. I, too, am your father.”

Nobile yearns for Leo XIV to embody that same fatherly closeness.

Despite her anxieties, she remains optimistic. In the La Stampa interview, she praised Pope Leo’s early messages of social justice and mercy, and expressed confidence that “the face of the Church” can continue to become more welcoming under his leadership.

Still, her invitation to Sunday’s Jubilee lunch is not merely symbolic hospitality —

Nobile sees it as a chance to have a frank conversation with Leo XIV about the lived realities of transgender Catholics and the importance of not reversing course on the gains in openness. “I hope it will be an opportunity to speak with him,” she said of the luncheon, and personally appeal for a Church that remains a home to “all, no one excluded.”

A Lunch Rich in Symbolism

The scheduled encounter this Sunday will take place in Paul VI Hall, where Pope Leo XIV is expected to sit down with hundreds of poor, homeless, and marginalized guests after celebrating Mass for the World Day of the Poor.

Including Alessia Nobile among the invited underscores a continuity with Pope Francis’s practice of accompaniment. Francis himself famously hosted lunches with vulnerable communities — even inviting groups of trans women to the Vatican during the pandemic to ensure they had food and support.

By breaking bread with Nobile, Leo XIV appears to be reaffirming that spirit. The Vatican’s Dicastery for Charity, which organized the event, has not released a detailed guest list, but Nobile’s presence has been confirmed in Italian media.

It will likely be the first time a reigning pope publicly shares a meal with an openly transgender guest in an official Jubilee celebration setting.

Observers note that this meeting comes at a critical juncture for the Church’s relationship with LGBTQ believers.

Under Pope Francis, there were significant gestures of inclusion — from supportive remarks about gay civil unions, to meetings with trans communities, to the synodal process that gave LGBTQ Catholics a platform.

Pope Leo XIV has so far signaled that he intends to continue a pastoral focus on society’s “least” and excluded.

In his message for this World Day of the Poor, released in June, Leo XIV stressed that caring for the poor and vulnerable is not optional but essential to the faith, echoing Francis’s tone.

Nobile’s supporters hope that her dialogue with Leo XIV will encourage the Pope to explicitly reassure LGBTQ Catholics of their place in the Church.

For Nobile herself, Sunday’s lunch is the fruition of a long, personal pilgrimage. Just three years ago, she stood outside church doors feeling unwelcome; now she will walk through the Vatican’s gates as an invited guest of the pope.

She has called it “a dream I never imagined.” Though mindful of remaining challenges, Nobile believes this encounter sends a powerful message.

“We transgenders here in Italy feel a bit more human because the pope brings us closer to the Church,” one of Nobile’s fellow activists said at a prior Vatican lunch — a sentiment Nobile surely shares.

As she takes her seat at the Jubilee table on Sunday, alongside refugees, the homeless, and other outsiders, Alessia Nobile will carry with her the memory of Pope Francis’s parting words and the hope that Pope Leo XIV will likewise affirm, in word and deed, that God’s love excludes no one.

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