After meeting, Jesuit says pope welcomes LGBTQ Catholics

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Leo XIV met privately Sept. 1 with Jesuit Father James Martin, an author and editor known for his ministry with LGBTQ Catholics.

Father Martin, who was in Rome to lead a Sept. 2-7 pilgrimage of LGBTQ Catholics, wrote on X: "I was honored and grateful to meet with the Holy Father @Pontifex this morning in an audience in the Apostolic Palace, and moved to hear the same message I heard from Pope Francis on LGBTQ Catholics, which is one of openness and welcome."

"I found Pope Leo to be serene, joyful, and encouraging," Father Martin posted. "For me, it was a deeply consoling meeting. Please pray for the Holy Father!"

As is its standard practice, the Vatican press office announced the meeting but provided no details.

In a message to Catholic News Service, Father Martin said, "Pope Leo wants to continue the path of Pope Francis, one of openness and welcome to LGBTQ Catholics."

At the 2012 Synod of Bishops on the new evangelization, then-Father Robert F. Prevost, the future Pope Leo, criticized television's positive portrayal of "anti-Christian" lifestyles.

He had told the synod that portrayals of the modern family on television and in films present a huge challenge to the Catholic Church. "Note, for example, how alternative families comprised of homosexual partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed on television programs and in cinema," he told synod members.

"The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that the mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public that when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective," he had said.

In September 2023, after he was made a cardinal, CNS asked him about his earlier remarks; he said, "I would say there's been a development in the sense of the need for the church to open and to be welcoming."

"On that level, I think Pope Francis has made it very clear that he doesn't want people to be excluded simply on the basis of choices that they make, whether it be lifestyle, work, the way they dress or whatever," he said.

"Doctrine has not changed," the cardinal said. "But we are looking to be more welcoming and more open and to say all people are welcome in the church."