At the conclusion of the general audience this Wednesday, June 5, Pope Francis greeted an 81-year-old nun in St. Peter’s Square who, for 56 years, has served homosexuals and “trans” people in Rome.
According to reports Vatican Newsis Sister Geneviève Jeanningros, religious of the Little Sisters of Jesus, who for some years has maintained an exchange of letters with the Holy Father.
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The nun — who lives in a caravan in Luna Park in Ostia Lido with another nun named Anna Amelia, to serve the LGBT community — comments that what she is interested in is “going where the Church finds it most difficult.” go”. “In this world we see all kinds of people pass by and the heart opens, we are all human people, you cannot have a strict judgment,” he adds.
At the meeting with the Pope, the nun is accompanied by Ada, who is celebrating her birthday and received a rosary as a gift from the Pontiff.
The nun shares with Vatican News that, some time ago, the family of a homosexual American doctor, who would have been denied a Catholic funeral due to his condition, was able to greet Pope Francis who blessed them; but that finally “departed in every way.”
Pope Francis’ first help
The nun remembers that one of the first help they received from the Pope came from the Pontifical Almoner, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski: “We asked for help and he came with a van full of things. If you also need (we pay) bills, bring them, he told us. I did it for my friends at Luna Park, Don Andrea (ed. a priest friend) for the trans community: around 40 or 50, many South Americans, more than one Argentinian.”
Sister Geneviève says that after this help and others more related to health, “the women then said: we want to thank Pope Francis! We said to ourselves: but how will they be received? I had no doubts about the Pope, but in general… You know, there is a bit of prejudice. I understand them, huh. I had them when I was young too, but then you meet people, you see their sensitivity. You cry and laugh with them.”
“The Pope received us… I don’t even know how to describe it!” he continues. “They love him so much because it is the first time that a Pope welcomes trans and gay people. They thank him because they have finally found a Church that has extended a hand to them.”
The controversy over Pope Francis’ statements about homosexuals
The close relationship, indicates Vatican News, would not have been affected by the leak of the Pope’s statements regarding “fagdom” in some seminaries, with the request not to accept more homosexual priests – something for which he later apologized. although days later he encouraged a young Italian gay man, expelled from the seminary, to continue with his vocation.
“Maybe at first there was a little suffering, but looking back they laughed and said: it’s not really like that. The Pope loves the little ones, he certainly does not throw them away,” said the nun, who will return to the general audience next Wednesday with ten people, seven of them homosexuals.
Walter Sánchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.