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American Solidarity

— Reflections on a changing Catholic Church

Cardinal Robert W. McElroy

by Nell Porter Brown

Like many Americans during this fractious election year, Cardinal Robert W. McElroy ’76 has been focused on politics and the state of the country. “We can idealize, as if times in the past were all graced with tremendous solidarity,” he says. “But I think we are in a profound moment of crisis on that question in our society. Individualism is corrosive from both ends of the political and ideological spectrum. And we have to really recover a sense of common identity, common purpose and mission on certain fundamental levels.”

A lifelong Catholic and a close collaborator of Pope Francis since 2022, McElroy’s approach to ministering is based in the more practical pastoral theology than a strict rule-bound Catholicism. It’s also been shaped by studying American history at Harvard, earning doctoral degrees in moral theology and political science, and experiences as a young priest in San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic. All have been integral to his longstanding push for greater social inclusion, in society and within the Church. Solidarity, he says, is “the principle that all of us are beneficiaries of the society to which we belong, and everyone has an obligation to all the members.”

That cohesion informed his childhood. He grew up with four siblings in San Mateo County (south of San Francisco) in a neighborhood that revolved around the thriving local parish. McElroy recognized his calling as a boy and studied at a high school seminary. Ordained in 1980, he was soon ministering in San Francisco and ultimately spent 15 rewarding years as the pastor at St. Gregory Church in San Mateo. He had always hoped to spend his life in parish ministry “because it is so directly rooted in the hearts and souls of real people,” he says. But Church leaders, valuing his intellect, tapped him for larger roles, and when he was appointed auxiliary bishop in 2010, he knew the rest of his life in the Church “would be rooted in pastoral service to my diocese and in contributing to the global dialogue about the Church’s future, both in its internal life and its outreach to the world.” In 2015 Pope Francis appointed him bishop of San Diego—where he oversees 96 parishes and a community of 1.4 million Catholics—and then appointed him to the College of Cardinals.

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Cardinal McElroy processing into St Peter’s Basilica for his official appointment as a cardinal in August 2022

That has meant continuing the duties of bishop but also spending more time in Rome and supporting the pope’s vision, especially his global Synod on Synodality, a multi-year process of reform that began in 2022. This “listening and dialogue” via meetings, following the Second Vatican Council’s proposed “renewal,” brings Catholics together to discern unified paths forward. McElroy, always a broad thinker, is integral to the pope’s efforts to effect changes in the Church—among them, more “accompaniment and support for” the LGBTQ+ community, lay leaders, and the role of women—that have been welcomed by many, but also vociferously opposed by other Church leaders, both in Rome and in the United States.

It is an extraordinary and pivotal time for the Church. Most Catholics “admire and cherish” Pope Francis, McElroy says: They agree with his focus on pastoral theology, “his notion that the Church is a field hospital bringing healing to souls, all in need of grace and support from one another, not condemnation.” Nevertheless, on issues like climate change, economic justice, poverty, LGBTQ+ rights, and war and peace, “The ideological polarization that cripples our society at this moment shapes divergent responses to the pope’s teachings,” he adds. “Many bishops who oppose the direction in which Pope Francis is leading the Church worry that his pastoral approach undermines the dedication to truth that is part of Catholic faith. Francis tells us that for the Christian, truth is not an idea, but a person—Jesus Christ—who calls us to conversion in love and mercy.”

The same political tribalism that’s “sapping our energy as a people and endangering our democracy…has entered destructively into the life of the Church.”

McElroy influences the reform process in person, but also through articles and speeches. America Magazine (led by the Jesuits) published an article headlined “Cardinal McElroy on ‘Radical Inclusion’ for L.G.T.B. People, Women, and Others, in the Catholic Church,” in which he addresses feedback from the synodal dialogues. He asserted that the same political tribalism that “is sapping our energy as a people and endangering our democracy…has entered destructively into the life of the Church.” The need to reform “our own structures of exclusion,” he concludes, “will require a long pilgrimage of sustained prayer, reflection, dialogue, and action—all of which should begin now.”

Just as crucial, however, he says, are the continuing issues of abortion and climate change, especially in this election year. He’s deeply concerned about forces threatening the fate of “democratic institutions, the Constitution, and the role of law. Catholic teaching has a particular perspective that those institutions are important.” The global escalation of violence—he has consistently called for a cease-fire in Gaza—is disturbing “not just for us as a country, but for so many people who get victimized by war,” he notes. “And our participation in it is such an important moral question.” He laments that conflict is so easily sown, and that civil conversation and disagreement, nearly impossible across partisan and ideological lines, impedes functional progress. Social media, despite their advantages, share considerable blame for that: “We move more and more into our own feedback loops, those we are comfortable with, and we think ‘Oh yeah, everyone agrees with me.’ It’s a huge problem.”

Seeking exposure to fresh and diverse perspectives led McElroy to choose a college outside of the Church—specifically, Harvard and its renowned history department. In 1972, never having traveled east of Nevada, he formed a close circle of friends (two of whom traveled to Rome to watch him become a member of the College of Cardinals), concentrated in American history, and graduated in three years.

Especially formative was “Themes in Comparative World Social History” taught by Loeb University Professor Oscar Handlin, the pioneering historian of American immigration. McElroy says that only four students took the year-long seminar because Handlin required them to read four books a week (no trouble for McElroy, who had taken a speed-reading course). “The other students could also do it and were really bright and interesting,” he says. “Their perspectives on everything were just enlightening to me. And Handlin? He had an encyclopedic knowledge of everything.” When McElroy had to write a paper on comparing nineteenth-century miscegenation laws in Brazil and Virginia, Handlin recommended three or four books, “just off the top of his head,” he recalls, “and they were the best books on the topic. And he did that with everyone in the class.” The depth and intensity of learning were thrilling, and spawned not only McElroy’s enduring interest in immigration but his continuing prioritizing of the Church’s role in aiding migrants and refugees.

Aside from classes, two shows of solidarity on campus also stand out. First: the legal drinking age was lowered to 18, which led “to the largest block party all over the place,” McElroy says, laughing. The second, more sobering, was the agreement that ostensibly ended American participation in the Vietnam War. “That was a moment of great thanksgiving and gratitude from the whole community because we had been facing the reality of the draft, for one thing, and the tragedy of the war for so many people as a whole. The University came together and there was a sense of unity.”

McElroy went on to earn a master’s degree in American history from Stanford, then a master’s in divinity from St. Patrick’s Seminary in 1979 before he was ordained. Among his other degrees are two doctorates (in political science from Stanford and in moral theology from the Gregorian University in Rome), both of which yielded books: The Search for an American Public Theology: The Contribution of John Courtney Murray (1989) and Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs (1992).

Academic work has always fed his mind—and his spirit. “Harvard honed my ability to write with greater clarity and elegance,” he says, and “the level of passion and self-assurance (sometimes justified and sometimes not) in the debates on myriad subjects that we had in the classroom, the dining hall at Mather House, or at parties taught me a great deal about speaking and listening and genuinely learning amidst all the bravado.” The combined experiences of Harvard, Stanford, and the seminary “introduced me to a wide diversity of human experiences, cultures, and social environments. Hopefully, this created in me a greater empathy, a willingness to listen, and an understanding that my own experience was just a small microcosm of the human reality in our world.”

That certainly came to bear while serving as a young priest in the 1980s at Saint Cecilia Church in San Francisco, where he was also secretary (and later vicar general) to Archbishop John R. Quinn, a leader in the Church’s stands on war and peace, poverty, and racial justice. As early as 1983, Quinn reached out to gay Catholics and supported a Castro neighborhood parish that held vigils for HIV-positive parishioners and their caregivers. McElroy co-wrote a diocesan report stating that homosexuality is not held to be a sinful condition and that homosexuals should be helped to follow the principle of “gradualism”: “the notion that Jesus called men and women as they were in real lives and recognized that their call to enflesh the gospel was a lifelong project,” he explains now. He also remembers visiting parishioners—“young people dying of this terrible and unknown disease. And very often their families refused to embrace them in their illness. I think it was then that I began to seek ways to show that LGBTQ+ persons are truly, equally members of the Catholic Church and that all dimensions and attitudes of exclusion should end.”

Throughout his cherished years as a parish pastor—the role he originally sought as a boy with a calling—he was moved and nurtured by “the way in which people allowed you into their lives to walk their journey with them.” Back then, he was sometimes asked if he ever got tired of listening to people’s problems. The answer was, and is, no. “It was inspiring…and you saw how difficult it was but how heroically so many people strive to live as they should.” To be let into others’ anguish is a privilege, he agrees, “and priests must be careful in presenting the image of God in a way that’s proper, too. The God who embraces us, who loves, is not diminished by our failures.”

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Conflict and profound loss

— The AIDS epidemic and religious protest

The Washington National Cathedral has been home to numerous affirming services over the years.

BY

(Editor’s note: Although there has been considerable scholarship focused on LGBTQ community and advocacy in D.C., there is a deficit of scholarship focused on LGBTQ religion in the area. Religion plays an important role in LGBTQ advocacy movements, through queer-affirming ministers and communities, along with queer-phobic churches in the city. This is the final installment of a three-part series exploring the history of religion and LGBTQ advocacy in Washington, D.C. Visit our website for the previous installments.)

Six sisters gathered not so quietly in Marion Park, Washington, D.C. on Saturday, October 8, 2022. As the first sounds of the Women’s March rang out two blocks away at 11 am, the Sisters passed out candles to say Mass on the grass. It was their fifth annual Lavender Mass, but this year’s event in particular told an interesting story of religious reclamation, reimagining a meaningful ritual from an institution that seeks to devalue and oppress queer people.

The D.C. Sisters are a chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an organization of “drag nuns” ministering to LGBTQ+ and other marginalized communities. What first began as satire on Easter Sunday 1979 when queer men borrowed and wore habits from a production of The Sound of Music became a national organization; the D.C. chapter came about relatively late, receiving approval from the United Nuns Privy Council in April 2016. The D.C. Sisters raise money and contribute to organizations focused on underserved communities in their area, such as Moveable Feast and Trans Lifeline, much like Anglican and Catholic women religious orders.

As Sister Ray Dee O’Active explained, “we tend to say we raise funds, fun, and hell. I love all three. Thousands of dollars for local LGBTQ groups. Pure joy at Pride parades when we greet the next generation of activists. And blatant response to homophobia and transphobia by protest after protest.” The Lavender Mass held on October 8th embodied their response to transphobia both inside and outside pro-choice groups, specifically how the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 intimately affects members of the LGBTQ+ community.

As a little history about the Mass, Sister Mary Full O’Rage, shown wearing a short red dress and crimson coronet and veil in the photo above developed the Lavender Mass as a “counterpart” or “counter narrative” to the Red Mass, a Catholic Mass held the first Sunday of October in honor Catholics in positions of civil authority, like the Supreme Court Justices. The plan was to celebrate this year’s Lavender Mas on October 1st at the Nuns of the Battlefield Memorial, located right across the street from the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, where many Supreme Court Justices attend the Red Mass every year.

As Sister Mary explained, this year “it was intended to be a direct protest of the actions of the Supreme Court, in significant measure their overturning of reproductive rights.”

Unfortunately, the October 1st event was canceled due to heavy rain and postponed to October 8th at the recommendation of Sister Ruth Lisque-Hunt and Sister Joy! Totheworld. The focus of the Women’s March this year aligned with the focus of the Lavender Mass—reproductive rights—and this cause, Sister Mary explained, “drove us to plan our Lavender Mass as a true counter-ritual and protest of the Supreme Court of who we expected to attend the Red Mass,” and who were protested in large at the Women’s March.

The “Lavender Mass was something that we could adopt for ourselves,” Sister Mary spoke about past events. The first two Masses took place at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, right around the corner from the Supreme Court. The second Mass, as Sister Mary explained, celebrated Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; “we canonized her.” Canonization of saints in the Catholic Church also takes place during a Mass, a Papal Mass in particular.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sisters moved the Mass outside for safety, and the third and fourth Masses were celebrated at the Nuns of the Battlefield Memorial. “It celebrates nuns, and we are nuns, psycho-clown nuns,” Sister Mary chuckled, “but we are nuns.” After the Mass, the Sisters would gather at a LGBTQ+ safe space or protest at the Catholic Church or Supreme Court. Although they often serve as “sister security” at local events, working to keep queer community members safe according to Sister Amore Fagellare, the Lavender Mass is not widely publicly advertised, out of concern for their own.

On October 8th, nine people gathered on the grass in a circle—six sisters, myself, and two people who were close with professed members—as Sister Mary called us to assemble before leading us all in chanting the chorus to Sister Sledge’s 1979 classic song “We Are Family.” 

Next, novice Sister Sybil Liberties set a sacred space, whereby Sister Ruth and Sister Tearyn Upinjustice walked in a circle behind us, unspooling pink and blue ribbons to tie us together as a group. As Sister Sybil explained, “we surround this sacred space in protection and sanctify it with color,” pink for the choice to become a parent and blue for the freedom to choose not to be a parent but also as Sybil elaboration, in recognition of “the broad gender spectrum of people with the ability to become pregnant.” This intentional act was sought to fight transphobia within the fight for reproductive rights.

After singing Lesley Gore’s 1963 song “You Don’t Own Me,” six speakers began the ritual for reproductive rights. Holding out our wax plastic candles, Sister Sybil explained that each speaker would describe a story or reality connected to reproductive rights, and “as I light a series of candles for the different paths we have taken, if you recognize yourself in one of these prayers, I invite you to put your hand over your heart, wherever you are, and know that you are not alone – there is someone else in this gathered community holding their hand over their heart too.”

The Sisters went around the circle lighting a candle for those whose stories include the choice to end a pregnancy; those whose include the unwanted loss of a pregnancy or struggles with fertility; those whose include the choice to give birth, raise or adopt a child; those whose include the choice not to conceive a child, to undergo forced choice, or with no choice at all; those who have encountered violence where there “should have been tenderness and care;” and those whose reproductive stories are still being written today.

After each reading, the group spoke together, “may the beginnings and endings in our stories be held in unconditional love and acceptance,” recalling the Prayer of the Faithful or General Intercessions at Catholic Masswhere congregations respond “Lord, hear our prayer” to each petition. Sister Sybil closed out the ritual as Sister Mary cut the blue and pink ribbons between each person, creating small segments they could take away with them and tie to their garments before walking to the Women’s March. The Sisters gathered their signs, drums, and horns before walking to Folger Park together into the crowd of protestors.

At first glance, the Lavender Mass may appear like religious appropriation, just as the Sisters themselves sometimes look to outsiders. They model themselves after Angelican and Catholic women religious, in dress—they actively refer to their clothing as “habits,” their organization—members must also go through aspirant, postulant, and novice stages to be fully professed and they maintain a hierarchical authority, and in action. Like white and black habits, the Sisters all wear white faces to create a unified image and colorful coronets, varying veil color based on professed stage. Sister Allie Lewya explained at their September 2022 meeting, “something about the veils gives us a lot of authority that is undue,” but as the Sisters reinforced at the Women’s March, they are not cosplayers nor customers, rather committed clergy.

As such, the Sisters see their existence within the liminal spaces between satire, appropriation, and reimagination, instead reclaiming the basis of religious rituals to counter the power holders of this tradition, namely, to counter the Catholic Church and how it celebrates those in positions of authority who restrict reproductive rights. Similarly, the Lavender Mass is modeled after a Catholic or Anglican Mass. It has an intention, namely reproductive rights, a call to assemble, setting of a sacred space, song, chant, and prayer requests. It even uses religious terminology; each section of the Mass is ended with a “may it be/Amen/Awen/Ashay/aho.”

While this ritual—the Lavender Mass—appropriates a religious ritual of the Catholic Church and Anglican Church, this religious appropriation is necessitated by exclusion and queerphobia. As David Ford explains in Queer Psychology, many queer individuals retain a strong connection to their faith communities even though they have experienced trauma from these same communities. Jodi O’Brien builds on this, characterizing Christian religious institutions as spaces of personal meaning making and oppression. This essay further argues that the fact this ritual is adopted and reimagined by a community that the dominant ritual holder—the Catholic Church—oppressed and marginalized, means that it is not religious appropriation at all.

Religious appropriation, as highlighted in Liz Bucar’s recent book, Stealing My Religion (2022), is the acquisition or use of religious traditions, rituals, or objects without a full understanding of the community for which they hold meaning. The Sisters, however, fully understand the implications of calling themselves sisters and the connotations of performing a ritual they call a “Mass” as women religious, a group that do not have this authority in the Catholic Church. It is the reclamation of a tradition that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence understand because some were or are part of the Catholic Church.

Some sisters still seek out spiritual meaning, but all also recognize that the Catholic Church itself is an institution that hinders their sisters’ access and actively spreads homophobia and transphobia to this day. As such, through the Lavender Mass, the sisters have reclaimed the Mass as a tool of rebellion in support of queer identity.

Just as the Sisters recognize the meaning and power of the ritual of a Mass, along with the connotations of being a sister, the Lavender Mass fulfilled its purpose as a ritual of intention just as the Sisters fulfill public servants. “As a sister,” Sister Ruth dissected, “as someone who identifies as a drag nun, it perplexes people, but when you get the nitty gritty, we serve a similar purpose, to heal a community, to provide support to a community, to love a community that has not been loved historically in the ways that it should be loved.

The Sisters’ intentionality in recognizing and upholding the role of a woman religious in their work has been well documented as a serious parody for the intention of queer activism by Melissa Wilcox. The Lavender Mass is a form of serious parody, as Wilcox posits in the book: Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody(2018). The Mass both challenges the queerphobia of the Catholic Church while also reinforcing the legitimacy of this ritual as a Mass. The Sisters argue that although they would traditionally be excluded from religious leadership in the Catholic Church, they can perform a Mass. In doing so, they challenge the role that women religious play in the Catholic Church as a whole and the power dynamics that exclude queer communities from living authentically within the Church.

By reclaiming a tradition from a religious institution that actively excludes and traumatizes the LGBTQ+ community, the Lavender Mass is a form of religious reclamation in which an oppressed community cultivates queer religious meaning, reclaims a tradition from which they are excluded, and uses it to fuel queer activism (the fight for reproductive rights). This essay argues that the Lavender Mass goes one step further than serious parody. While the Sisters employ serious parody in their religious and activist roles, the Lavender Mass is the active reclamation of a religious tradition for both spiritual and activist ends.

Using the celebration of the Mass as it was intended, just within a different lens for a different purpose, this essay argues, is religious reclamation. As a collection of Austrian and Aotearoan scholars explored most recently in a chapter on acculturation and decolonization, reclamation is associated with the reassertion and ownership of tangibles: of rituals, traditions, objects, and land. The meaning of the Lavender Mass comes not only from the Sisters’ understanding of women religious as a social and religious role but rather from the reclamation of a physical ritual—a Mass—that has specific religious or spiritual meaning for the Sisters.

When asked why it was important to call this ritual a “Mass,” Sister Mary explained: “I think we wanted to have something that denoted a ritual, that was for those who know, that the name signifies that it was a counter-protest. And you know, many of the sisters grew up with faith, not all of them Catholics but some, so I think ‘Mass’ was a name that resonated for many of us.”

As Sister Ray said, “my faith as a queer person tends to ostracize me but the Sisters bring the imagery and language of faith right into the middle of the LGBTQ world.” This Lavender Mass, although only attended and experienced by a few of the Women’s March protests, lived up to its goal as “a form of protest that is hopefully very loud,” as Sister Millie Taint advertised in the Sisters’ September 2022 chapter meeting. It brought religious imagery and language of faith to a march for reproductive rights, using a recognized model of ritual to empower protestors.

The Lavender Mass this year, as always, was an act of rebellion, but by situating itself before the Women’s March and focusing its intention for reproductive rights, the Sisters’ reclaimed a religious ritual from a system of authority which actively oppressed LGBTQ+ peoples and those with the ability to become pregnant, namely the Catholic Church, and for harnessing it for personal, political, and spiritual power. In essence, it modeled a system of religious reclamation, by which a marginalized community takes up a religious ritual to make its own meaning and oppose the religious institution that seeks to exclude the community from ritual participation.

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A brief history of LGBTQ religion in D.C.

— Road to inclusion gained momentum in 1960s

Legendary local activist Frank Kameny brought together 11 clergymen from Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities for a conference in 1965.

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“By integration of homosexuals into the religious community M.S.W. [The Mattachine Society of Washington], means acceptance of homosexuals as homosexuals not as candidates for change or ‘cure,’” said Franklin E. Kameny, the founder of the Washington Mattachine Society.

More than 10 years before the United Church of Christ’s General Synod accepted a resolution encouraging UCC congregations to welcome lesbian, gay, and bisexual people and six years before the Metropolitan Community Church of Washington, D.C. was founded, Kameny brought together members of the Mattachine Society and 11 clergymen from Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities around the Capital. The conference, held at American University on March 22, 1965, marked a critical moment in which Washingtonian clergy committed to advocate on behalf of LGBTQ individuals.

The result was a more than 50-year partnership between Washingtonian clergy members and LGBTQ individuals that continued through the AIDS crisis, the founding of open and affirming congregations, and far-right Christian movements in the late 2010s and 2020s. The need for religious and spiritual meaning and community has existed as long as LGBTQ communities, but traditionally, the historical narrative of queerness and religion has been driven by how religious leaders and communities have inflicted trauma and harm on queer members. This narrative is valid and acknowledges how religious communities and people have hurt LGBTQ folks but fails to acknowledge how queer people were instrumental in forming inclusive communities and how some religious leaders were key players in the LGBTQ rights movement.

The Mattachine Society was originally founded in Los Angeles by activist Harry Hay to protect and advocate for the rights of gay men. The Society published a monthly periodical, One: The Homosexual Viewpoint, which released its first issue focused on religion in December 1960 titled “Homosexual, Servant of God.” Just one year later Kameny and Jack Nichols, a 23-year-old native Washingtonian, founded the Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW).

It wouldn’t be long before Kameny and MSW members began thinking critically about their community’s spiritual needs and how they could partner with local clergy members, since their faiths were largely responsible for public perception and discrimination against gay men at the time. Nichols stepped forward to create the Washington Area Council on Religion and Homosexual, a subcommittee of the MSW. The following year Kameny and Nichols organized the conference between Washingtonian faith leaders and MSW members. The first meeting in March set the groundwork for the second on May 24, 1965, where the group founded the Washington Area Council on Religion and the Homosexual.

The constitution of the new organization was formally adopted on Dec. 6, 1965. The purpose of this organization is, as the constitution notes, “to effect the integration of the individual homosexual into the religious life of the community be alleviation of the estrangement and alienation, which now exists between the homosexual and the religious community.”

In 1967, Nichols and Reverend Lorey Graham, chaplain at American University, appeared on WJZ-TV Baltimore to answer questions about “The Second Largest Minority.” Both answered questions from the host and the audience, explaining that homosexuality was not a pathology. “The significance of this show lies in the fact,” Nichols wrote in The Homosexual Citizen, “that for the first time, a distinguished Methodist clergyman on the East Coast has publicly associated himself with the civil libertarian aims of the homophile movement and has made his views known to a wider television audience.”

Founding new communities

But this partnership wasn’t confined to television. These conversations in the 1960s laid the groundwork for Washingtonian faith communities to found specific internal organizations and ministries for LGBTQ individuals. In 1971, Dignity/Washington — a chapter of the Catholic LGBTQ organization Dignity USA — was established by six people in the first-floor cafeteria of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Sr. Jeannine Gramick, Patrick Mills, Fr. Greg Slamone, Joe Cicero, and another individual saw a need for a queer Catholic ministry and started the chapter. The group became a chapter in 1972 and met at the Newman Center on GWU’s campus. Several of these founders also established the LGBTQ Catholic New Ways Ministry just across the river in 1977.

When Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass at St. Matthew Cathedral on Saturday, Oct. 6, 1979, he was greeted by 30 members of the Dignity/Washington chapter holding a banner reading, “Dignity Gay and Lesbian Catholics Welcome You.” Integrity/Washington, a local chapter of the gay and lesbian Episcopal organization Integrity USA, was founded shortly thereafter.

In 1983, Westminister Presbyterian became one of the first 13 Presbyterian congregations to form the More Light Network, a ministry for the LGBTQ community. The D.C. church had been working with the LGBTQ community since the early 1960s, openly sharing that they “fought for the inclusion of and end of discrimination against the LGBTQ+ family. We do not just accept but celebrate the gifts God has given through our varied sexual orientations and gendered understandings.”

Many churches in D.C. also responded to the call to become “Open and Affirming.” In 1985, the United Church of Christ’s General Synod accepted a resolution encouraging UCC congregations across the country to “Declare Themselves Open and Affirming” after a period of dialogue and reflection. In 1987, the First Congregational United Church of Christ voted to become one of the first Open and Affirming congregations in the DMV area. First Congregational was also one of the first 15 certified Open and Affirming Congregations in the United States.

Within these congregations, LGBTQ individuals were welcomed and celebrated. In 1982, gay activist L. Page “Deacon” Maccubbin and his life partner Jim Bennett were one of the first couples to celebrate a Holy Union and were the second couple to be registered as domestic partners in Washington, D.C.

More denominations followed suit, but in the late 1970s, LGBTQ individuals established their own faith communities. One whole church was established — the Metropolitan Community Church of Washington, D.C. — solely to serve the LGBTQ community in 1970. Members first met in Rev. J.E. Paul Breton’s home on Capitol Hill the following year. The wider MCC would become the largest LGBTQ-affirming mainline Protestant denomination, with churches spreading across the country through the 1970s and 1980s. Following suit, Bet Mishpachah was founded by members of D.C.’s LGBTQ community as Washington’s only Egalitarian synagogue in 1975, now identified as “a congregation for gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, trans, and queer Jews.”

Thus begins D.C.’s LGBTQ religious history in the 1960s onwards; the history of LGBTQ-affirming religious organizations and ministries prior to the 1960s is extremely limited and their exclusion here does not mean they did not exist in D.C. before these first two conferences at American University in 1964. But despite these pieces of communion between the LGBTQ community and religious organizations in the 1970s and early 1980s, the former would face significant backlash at the hands of religious leaders in the mid to late 1980s with the 1976 Gay Pride Day and the HIV/AIDS Epidemic.

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N.Y. Archdiocese Condemns Funeral of Transgender Activist at Cathedral

— In a statement, the pastor of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan said the church was not aware of Ms. Gentili’s background, or her avowed atheism, when it agreed to host the Thursday service.

Cecilia Gentili, an activist and actress well known for her advocacy on behalf of sex workers, was celebrated at the funeral as “Saint Cecilia, the mother of all whores.”

By Liam Stack

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York condemned the funeral of a transgender community leader that was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Thursday, calling the event an insult to the Catholic faith and saying it was unaware of the identity of the deceased — or her vocal atheism — when it agreed to host the service.

The funeral, which drew well over 1,000 people, celebrated the life of Cecilia Gentili, an activist and actress well known for her advocacy on behalf of sex workers, transgender people and people living with H.I.V. She was also a self-professed atheist, a topic around which she built a one-woman Off Broadway show.

The service on Thursday was an event that most likely had no precedent in Catholic history. The pews were packed with mourners, many of them transgender, who wore daring high-fashion outfits and cheered as eulogists led them in praying for transgender rights and access to gender-affirming health care.

People guide a coffin down the center aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Catholic liberals, including some parishioners at St. Patrick’s, said the church had done a good thing by hosting the funeral of a transgender person. Some conservative Catholics vehemently disagreed.

One eulogy, a video clip of which was widely shared online Friday, remembered Ms. Gentili as “Saint Cecilia, the mother of all whores,” to the thunderous cheers of a nearly full cathedral.

Catholic liberals, including some parishioners at St. Patrick’s, said that regardless of how some mourners behaved, the church had done a good thing by hosting the funeral of a transgender person. But the response from conservatives was fiery.

CatholicVote, a conservative group, called the funeral “unbelievable and sick” and said it was “a mockery of the Christian faith.” The Rev. Nicholas Gregoris, a co-founder of the Priestly Society of Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman, called it “revolting,” a “blasphemous & sacrilegious fiasco” and “a deplorable desecration of America’s most famous Catholic Church.”

On Saturday, the archdiocese released a statement saying it shared the anger of conservative Catholics over what it called “the scandalous behavior” at Ms. Gentili’s funeral. The Rev. Enrique Salvo, the pastor of St. Patrick’s, said the church was not aware of Ms. Gentili’s background or beliefs when it agreed to host the service.

“The cathedral only knew that family and friends were requesting a funeral Mass for a Catholic, and had no idea our welcome and prayer would be degraded in such a sacrilegious and deceptive way,” the pastor said.

A priest stands and speaks at a pulpit. In front of the pulpit is a large photograph of Cecilia Gentili.
In its statement on Saturday, the archdiocese of New York said it shared the anger of conservative Catholics over what it called “the scandalous behavior” at Ms. Gentili’s funeral.

The funeral’s organizer, Ceyenne Doroshow, said on Thursday that Ms. Gentili’s family had kept her background “under wraps” because they feared the archdiocese would not host a funeral for a person it knew was transgender.

Ms. Doroshow said the family wanted Ms. Gentili’s funeral to be at St. Patrick’s because “it is an icon, just like her.”

On Saturday, the Gentili family was incensed by the church’s criticism and accused the archdiocese of “hypocrisy and anti-trans hatred” in a statement.

The family said the L.G.B.T.Q. community would continue to celebrate Ms. Gentili for how she “ministered, mothered and loved all people.”

“Her heart and hands reached those the sanctimonious church continues to belittle, oppress and chastise,” the family said. “The only deception present at St. Patrick’s Cathedral is that it claims to be a welcoming place for all.”

Members of Ms. Gentili’s family stand in a line holding hands just outside a cathedral door.
The Gentili family accused the New York archdiocese of “hypocrisy and anti-trans hatred” in a statement on Saturday.

The day before the funeral, the archdiocese described the service as a routine event, even after it was informed by a reporter that Ms. Gentili was a transgender activist.

On Wednesday, a spokesman for the archdiocese, Joseph Zwilling, said that “a funeral is one of the corporal works of mercy,” a part of Catholic teaching the church has described as “a model for how we should treat all others, as if they were Christ in disguise.”

But on Saturday, Father Salvo said in the statement that the cathedral had held a special Mass of Reparation to atone for the funeral. Mr. Zwilling said the event happened that day.

“That such a scandal occurred at ‘America’s parish church’ makes it worse,” Father Salvo said, referring to the funeral. “That it took place as Lent was beginning, the annual 40-day struggle with the forces of sin and darkness, is a potent reminder of how much we need the prayer, reparation, repentance, grace and mercy to which this holy season invites us.”

New York City is home to roughly a dozen gay-friendly Catholic parishes that in many ways reflect the church’s softer tone on sexuality under the leadership of Pope Francis. But St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the seat of the powerful archdiocese, is not one of them.

Ms. Gentili, who died on Feb. 6 at age 52, had a complex relationship with religion, which she explored last year in her Off Broadway show, “Red Ink.”

After a religious upbringing, Ms. Gentili said in an interview last year, she came to identify as an atheist because she felt rejected by so many Christian denominations as a transgender woman.

“I used to go with my grandmother to the Baptist Church, and they didn’t want me there,” she said, adding: “I used to go to the Catholic Church, too, and both were such traumatic experiences for me as a queer person. So I came to identify as an atheist, but I know that so many trans people have been able to find a relationship with faith in spaces that include them.”

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Pope’s Shift on Gay Couples Followed Quiet Talks and Loud Resistance

— Pope Francis spoke with L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics and their supporters for years before letting priests bless same-sex couples. But the move’s timing also owed something to its conservative opponents.

By Jason Horowitz

In March 2021, as stunned L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics grappled with a Vatican document approved by Pope Francis that ruled against blessing same-sex unions, one of his confidants, who is gay, says they spoke on the phone.

Juan Carlos Cruz, a sexual abuse survivor who had befriended the pope over years of conversations, says that Francis, who had just returned from Iraq, gave him the sense that the Vatican “machine” had gotten ahead of him in the ruling; it stated that God “cannot bless sin.”

But he says Francis “acknowledged that the buck stops with him. I got the impression that he wanted to fix it.”

For Mr. Cruz, who visited Francis for his 87th birthday over the weekend, and for many L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, Francis did just that this week. He signed off on a major declaration by the same Vatican office on church doctrine that had issued the negative ruling two years before.

The new rule allows priests to bless same-sex couples as long as the blessing is not connected to the ceremony of a same-sex union, to avoid confusion with the sacrament of marriage. While the declaration does not change church teaching that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,” it is a concrete sign of acceptance for a portion of the faithful that the church has long castigated.

Juan Carlos Cruz, clean-shaven and with short dark hair, in a gray V-neck sweater and checked shirt.
Juan Carlos Cruz, a sexual abuse survivor from Chile who befriended the pope.

Now, as liberals celebrate and same-sex couples begin receiving public blessings, some are wondering why the pope delivered the groundbreaking rule now, more than a decade after he started his pontificate with a resoundingly inclusive message on gay issues. “Who am I to judge?” he famously said in 2013, when asked about a priest rumored to be gay.

People who have talked to him over the years and Vatican analysts say Francis’ thinking evolved through frequent private conversations with L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics and the priests and nuns who minister to them.

It was a long process, filled with fits and starts, but also the result of a gradual reorganization of the church by Francis, including the recent appointment to top jobs of like-minded churchmen who were amenable to the changes. The death last year of his conservative predecessor freed the pope’s hand, experts say, but they also believe that the overreach of Vatican antagonists — who sought to box Francis in — played a part, backfiring spectacularly.

“Like anyone, he learns from listening,” said Rev. James Martin, a prominent advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, who has met frequently with Francis, a fellow Jesuit, and talked to him about the need to better recognize these members of the church.

Speaking this week, Father Martin would not divulge the content of those meetings over recent years, though he noted they had become “longer and longer.” During the most recent conversation in October, around the time of a major church assembly, he said that Francis “encouraged me, as he always does, to focus on the individual, to focus on the person, to focus on the pastoral needs.” The new document, he said, “is very much in line with that, that approach.”

Father James Martin, with a hand upraised, blessing two men in an apartment.
Rev. James Martin, a prominent advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, gave a blessing this week after the church ruling.

Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based advocacy group for gay Catholics, said he also met with the pope in October and sensed a similar opening to a change. Among the others at the meeting, he said, was Sister Jeannine Gramick, an American nun who has ministered to L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics for a half century and was censured by Francis’ predecessors. Mr. DeBernardo said they met with Francis for 50 minutes and talked about blessings.

“Out of the blue, he said, ‘You know, what gets me most upset are priests who chastise people in the confessional, who reprimand them,’” Mr. DeBernardo recalled. It is that instinct, to emphasize pastoral welcoming over “giving litmus tests for orthodoxy,” that he sees as key to the new document.

The Vatican and the office responsible for the declaration did not reply to requests for comment about specific meetings or the decision-making process behind the document.

In his decade as pope, Francis has filled L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics with hope. He made a point to congratulate Sister Gramick and encourage her work. He met with and ministered to transgender Catholics himself and counseled gay couples on the upbringing of their children. He said homosexuality should not be criminalized and supported civil unions. And he recently made it clear that transgender people can be baptized, serve as godparents and be witnesses at church weddings.

But he also frequently confounded L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics with mixed messages, making it difficult to tell where Francis, for all his inclusive language, actually stood.

After the 2021 ruling against blessings, many of Francis’s liberal supporters note that he immediately sought to distance himself from it. They argue that it was rammed through without the pope’s understanding its full import or that he allowed it to go forward only under pressure from the doctrinal office, an explanation that top conservative cardinals mocked and that members of the office at the time said was simply not true.

Throughout, Francis kept talking to gay Catholics and their advocates, even as he had to weigh tensions on the left and the right that could affect the future of the church.

In Germany, where the church is liberal, priests have been blessing gay unions against Vatican orders, and bishops in Belgium have even published guidelines for blessings at same-sex ceremonies, something the new declaration prohibits. But in conservative African nations, where the church sees its future, opposition to gay rights and unions is fervent.

Already there have been some signs of revolt, with the conservative publication The Catholic Herald reporting that Archbishop Tomash Peta of Saint Mary in Astana, Kazakhstan, had sent a letter prohibiting his priests from performing blessings for same-sex couples, calling the declaration a “great deception.”

Two men standing on front of a priest outside a Gothic cathedral.
Same-sex couples participating in a public blessing ceremony in front of Cologne Cathedral in September. In Germany, where the church is liberal, priests have been blessing gay unions against Vatican orders.

But as Francis has aged, and ailed, he seems to be in more of a hurry to finish remaking his church.

In January last year, he fired the doctrine office’s No. 2 official, Archbishop Giacomo Morandi, who was widely considered responsible for the 2021 document, sending him to a small Italian town. (Archbishop Morandi did not return a request for comment.) In July, the pope then reorganized the office, appointing a close adviser and fellow Argentine, Víctor Manuel Fernández, as its chief.

“Finally after 10 years of pontificate, Francis was able to appoint a cardinal that responds to his vision of the church,” said Mr. Politi.

Sandro Magister, another longtime Vatican expert who thinks that Francis’ unilateral decisions are undercutting his professed belief in a church governed by consensus, agreed that Cardinal Fernández was key, as was the death of the pope’s predecessor, Benedict XVI.

“After Benedict died, Francis has started to dare,” he said. Had Benedict remained alive, he added, Francis would never have made Cardinal Fernández watchdog of the church’s doctrine, a position Benedict held for more than 20 years.

Early in his tenure, Cardinal Fernández, loathed by conservatives, indicated that the question of gay blessings was likely to be examined again. It didn’t take long for conservatives to test him, and Francis.

Víctor Manuel Fernández leading Mass as an archbishop.
Francis appointed a close adviser and fellow Argentine, Víctor Manuel Fernández, to lead the church’s doctrine office.

Over the summer, Cardinal Raymond Burke — an American and the de facto leader of the opposition to the pope — and other conservatives sent a letter to Francis asking for a definitive answer on the blessings. The 2021 document seemed to give them a precedent, and an advantage.

Then they made their demand for clarification public just before a major October assembly of bishops and laypeople that was expected to tackle such sensitive topics. It seemed like a clear warning shot to Francis and his doctrine office.

Cardinal Fernández responded by publishing Francis’ private response. While the pope clearly upheld the church position that marriage could exist only between a man and a woman, he said that priests should exercise “pastoral charity” when it came to requests for blessings, a seeming reversal of the “cannot bless sin” ruling.

Francis seemed to have opened the door a crack. Then, this week, Cardinal Fernández burst through it.

In his introduction to the new rule, he cited the pope’s response to Cardinal Burke as a critical factor in the ruling. It provided, he wrote, “important clarifications for this reflection and represents a decisive element.”

In other words, the conservatives kept pushing for an answer, and they got one.

“Let us remain vigilant,” Pope Francis said Thursday in his traditional Christmas greetings to members of the Curia, the bureaucracy that runs the Vatican, “against rigid ideological positions that often, under the guise of good intentions, separate us from reality and prevent us from moving forward.”

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