Cardinal Cobo to Congress of LGBT Catholics: we are opening doors

The archbishop of Madrid (Spain), Cardinal José Cobo, sent a letter to a summit of LGBT Catholics in which he talks about opening “new doors” and “new pastoral attitudes.”

“We are opening new doors and new pastoral attitudes that allow understanding, and make us all feel walkers of hope,” he said in the letter to the assembly of the World Catholics Network of rainbows (GNRC) that is celebrated these days in Madrid.

According to the letter, it is a meeting “prior to the jubilee of people with diverse sexual orientation and their relatives that will take place in Rome, at the beginning of September of this year.”

The official calendar of the Jubilee 2025 He does not mention any event with that theme, and informs that in September the Consolation Jubileethat of Workers for justice And that of the Catechists.

In the letter, Cardinal Cobo expresses his desire that the event will serve his members “to arrange us with intensity to ‘enter through the Holy Gate’, and that this reduces in a deeper encounter with Christ.”

“To him I entrust and ask that this assembly give abundant fruits at the service of the announcement of the joy of the Gospel in all contexts,” adds the cardinal.

The also vice president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) asks God for “wisdom and prudence to promote a church where we listen to each other, open doors, cozy and fraternal, capable of walking from respect, compassion and delicacy.”

He also points out that “enough to achieve the quality and warmth of Jesus’ welcome” will never be done, who, the purple, “knew how to reveal the humanity of each person, discovered even wounds and suffering, passing to second any other consideration.”

Promote “the effective inclusion of those who want to walk in the church”

Cardinal Cobo also points out in the letter that “regardless of the complexity of situations and our world, the centrality of the person and their dignity should be normative for all Christians.”

“Christian communities, also on the way and eager to avoid all kinds of unfair discrimination and processes that dehumanize, in addition to reception, we must promote a culture of dialogue, accompaniment and the effective inclusion of those who want to walk in the church,” he added.

LGBT Pastoral in the Archdiocese of Madrid

Last July, Cardinal Cobo received in the Archbishop’s palace a delegation of the Crismhom organization, an acronym for “Christian and Christians of Madrid Homosexuals”, belonging to the Spanish FelgTB Federation.

When Crismhom reported the meeting, he said he considered it “the starting pistol of a work together.”

Asked by ACI Press about how this collaboration was to be completed, the archbishopric of Madrid said that “a specialized or institutionalized pastoral is not going to develop” for LGTB people.