Bishop Francesco Savino, vice president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, celebrated Mass at the Church of the Gesù on Saturday for LGBT pilgrims in Rome for the Jubilee of Hope.
An Italian lay association organized the international pilgrimage, which included a morning Mass celebration inside the mother church of the Society of Jesus in Rome and a St. Peter’s Basilica Holy Door pilgrimage in the afternoon.
More than 1,000 pilgrims from around the world attended the Mass concelebrated by approximately 30 priests, including American Father James Martin, SJ, who had met with Pope Leo XIV in a Sept. 1 private audience at the Vatican.
Several people, including religious brothers and sisters, waved rainbow-colored fans to keep cool inside the packed church and some wore shirts with a phrase from 1 John 4:18, “nell’amore non c’e timore” (“there is no fear in love”), during the Mass.
In his homily, Savino underscored the inherent dignity of every person and the need to “restore dignity to those who had been denied it.”
“We are all a pilgrim people of hope and we want to leave this celebration more joyful and hopeful than ever,” Savino said during his homily. “We have to go forward, convinced that God loves us [with] a unique and unrepeatable love … unconditional love.”
“In that awareness there is the foundation of all hope,” he said.
Reflecting on the selected Mass readings and Gospel for the day, Savino said St. Paul’s writings in the New Testament teach us that “a small step” in the midst of great human limitations may be “more pleasing to God than the outwardly correct life” of those who do not experience trials in life.
“We all have to convert, that is, we turn, we look in the opposite direction than before. The Acts of the Apostles documents this experience as defining and definitive,” he said.
“Truly I am realizing that each of us, you here present, your family members, your brothers and sisters, we pastors and disciples of the Lord — each of us has had in our lives to accept or to reject a living truth,” he added.
Asking the Lord to “deliver us freely from any polemical or ideological temptation, from any preconceived temptation based on prejudice,” the Italian bishop spoke of the need for “Peter and the Apostolic College to put living truth before dead truth,” a reference to the pope and bishops today.
The Sept. 6 Mass concluded with rounds of loud applause and great emotion. Family members and friends sang the recessional hymn and hugged each other as the bishop and concelebrating priests processed out of the main part of the basilica, led by a pilgrim holding a rainbow-colored cross.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, people with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies … must be treated with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”
The catechism also states that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and “under no circumstances can they be approved.”
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This article was originally published on Catholic News Agency.
