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Pope Leo XIV named Bishop Michael Saporito, an auxiliary of Newark since 2020, the sixth bishop of Metuchen, New Jersey, on Tuesday morning.
The Vatican’s daily bulletin carried the usual biography: Saporito is 64, a Newark native raised in Bloomfield who worked as a public accountant before entering the seminary in 1987, and a priest since 1992.
The bulletin left out the part of his record that might say the most about where this papacy is headed.
For nearly seven years as pastor of St. Joseph in Maplewood, Saporito led a parish that hosted a periodic gathering for gay Catholics and their family members, and the parish still runs a group for LGBT Catholics and those who love them today, under the name Open Arms Ministry.
When Pope Francis made him a bishop in February 2020, Church Militant (the traditionalist site that shut down in 2024 after losing a defamation suit) greeted the news under the headline “New Pro-LGBT Auxiliary Heading to Newark.”
He has taken part in New Ways Ministry’s private two-day dialogues, where bishops sit with LGBT Catholics, theologians, and pastoral ministers, and this April he was quoted saying he “felt enriched by the exchange of personal stories and information that was offered.”
He added a line few bishops put on the record: “I had many questions answered and still need time to learn more.”
Metuchen is a diocese of some 670,000 Catholics across four central Jersey counties (Middlesex, Somerset, Hunterdon, and Warren). It has been without a bishop since November, when James Checchio left for New Orleans.
Checchio’s own record on this question is the reason New Ways Ministry flagged his promotion in March; several months after the Pulse nightclub massacre in 2016, he attended an LGBT ministry gathering at Sacred Heart in South Plainfield and, in the words of ministry leader David Harvie, “stayed and talked to every person — made a point to go around to get to know them.”
So the pope has handed a diocese whose last bishop showed up for gay Catholics to a priest who once gave them a room in his parish. Nobody in Rome makes that kind of match by accident, and this pope has now made it at least five times stateside.
Tobin’s bench
Start with the man who consecrated him. On May 21, 2017, Cardinal Joseph Tobin stood in the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark to welcome a pilgrimage of LGBT Catholics from New York and five New Jersey dioceses, a welcome one pilgrim, Ed Poliandro of St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan, said “felt like a miracle.”
“I am Joseph, your brother,” he told them. “I am your brother, as a disciple of Jesus. I am your brother, as a sinner who finds mercy with the Lord.”
Three years later, Francis gave Tobin an auxiliary from his own presbyterate, and on June 30, 2020, Tobin laid hands on Saporito in that same cathedral.
Leo has now taken that auxiliary and given him a diocese of his own, one that shares a border with Newark. Tobin is one of the pope’s top ally in the American hierarchy, and the Metuchen appointment reads as a vote of confidence in the church he has been building in New Jersey for nine years.
The rest of the record
The appointments are only the part of the record. Leo received Fr. James Martin in the library of the Apostolic Palace for more than half an hour on Sept. 1, 2025, and Martin walked out saying he had “heard the same message from Pope Leo that I heard from Pope Francis about welcoming LGBTQ people.”
Five days later, some 1,200 LGBT Catholics crossed the Holy Door of St. Peter’s on a Jubilee pilgrimage Francis had placed on the official Jubilee calendar. At the turn of the year, Leo removed one of his own masters of ceremonies after a hot mic caught him using an anti-gay slur.
Flying home from Africa in April, he told reporters that “the unity or division of the church should not revolve around sexual matters,” and that “justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion” all take priority over it.
A synod study group’s report published in May carried, for the first time in a Vatican document, the testimony of two gay men in their own words; last week I wrote about the cardinal of Naples putting his name on a book about transgender Catholics.
None of this has moved a line of the Catechism. He told Elise Ann Allen, for her biography, that he found it “highly unlikely, certainly in the near future” that the Church’s teaching on sexuality and marriage would change. In the same conversation he said something that explains the appointments better than any doctrinal note could: “We have to change attitudes before we even think about changing what the Church says about any given question.”
Feed my sheep
Attitudes do not change by decree.
They change when a bishop stays after the meeting to talk with every person in the room, or when a pastor lets gay parishioners and their families gather at the parish on a weeknight. Leo’s method is personnel.
One diocese at a time, he is choosing the men who decide whether a gay Catholic in Middlesex County finds the church door open.
Saporito’s episcopal motto is “Feed My Sheep,” the words the risen Jesus spoke to Peter on the shore of Galilee in the twenty-first chapter of John, spoken after Peter’s denial, as the mission was handed back to him.
Peter’s successor has just told a Newark accountant-turned-priest to go feed the sheep of central New Jersey. Which sheep count has been the fight inside the American church for thirty years, and the LifeSite headline from August (“Gay media celebrates Pope Leo XIV’s 4 pro-LGBT bishop appointments”) is the sound of one side losing it, one appointment at a time.
The “gay media” in that headline was, in large part, this newsletter. LifeSite’s complaint is that a gay news site’s list of Leo’s LGBT-friendly bishops “draws heavily from a liberal Catholic Substack, Letters from Leo, authored by former Obama staffer Christopher Hale.”
Letters from Leo being part of the gay media was news to many, myself included, but nevertheless, LifeSite will need to update the count to five.
Here is the list as I have reported it since the pontificate began, starting in the United States. Thomas Hennen, a Davenport priest with a decade of LGBT ministry behind him, went to Baker, Oregon, in July 2025, two months after Leo’s election.
Ramón Bejarano followed in December, leaving San Diego, where he had backed the diocesan LGBT ministry as an auxiliary, for Monterey, California. James Checchio took over New Orleans in February, and now Saporito has New Jersey.
Abroad, the pope gave Eichstätt, in Bavaria, to Christian Würtz, a Freiburg auxiliary who backed the German Synodal Way’s resolutions on blessing same-sex couples.
Last November he sent Cardinal Grzegorz Ryś to Kraków to replace an archbishop who had called LGBT rights a “rainbow plague.”
The fifteen consultors he named in August to the Vatican’s office for religious life include Sister Patricia Murray, who has said the Church must “allow the topics that people want to talk about to be named.”
The wider bench tells the same story: in Tokyo, Cardinal Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi welcomed Japan’s national campaign on sexual minorities in June, and in Naples, Cardinal Domenico Battaglia put his name to a book about transgender Catholics this month. There are many more, and the list grows most months.
The new bishop said Tuesday that he looks forward to “walking with” the people of Metuchen “as we seek to follow Jesus Christ and bear witness to the hope of the Gospel.”
The gay Catholics of South Plainfield, who once watched a bishop stay late to learn their names, now get one who sat through two days of New Ways Ministry’s dialogue doing the same.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the gay Catholics of Maplewood and South Plainfield who kept showing up at parishes that were not always sure they wanted them, and with the pastors and bishops who opened the door anyway.
Pope Leo XIV is building a church where that welcome is policy, and the tool he has chosen is the men he names.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a church that means it when it says everyone is welcome. They want a faith that starts where the risen Jesus started with Peter on the shore of Galilee, with a question about love, and then sends us out to feed the sheep, every one of them.
If you believe this movement matters, Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every person against those who would keep the door shut, I am asking you to join us.
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Feed my sheep - the message of the Gospels resonates for those attuned and willing to hear and heed.
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