Great Celebrations on the Eve of the LGBTQ+ Pilgrimage to St. Peter’s

I am in Rome this week representing New Ways Ministry for the LGBTQ+ Pilgrimage of Hope for the Jubilee Year, which is happening today.  I hope to have a full report on that experience posted here on Monday, September 8, 2025.

The LGBTQ+ pilgrims walking along the via Francigena Sud

The pilgrimage will begin at the Piazza Pia, near the Castel Sant’Angelo, at the Tiber River, and pilgrims will walk along the Via della Conciliazione, the road which leads to St. Peter’s Basilica, where they will enter the church through the Jubilee’s Holy Door, open only during Jubilee years.

But like any joyous holiday or holy day, the “eve,” or the day before, also holds some special treats.  One of the treats was the arrival in Rome of an even longer, more arduous pilgrimage that a group of  LGBTQ+ Catholics have been on during the past week or so.  A group of pilgrims have walked over 100 km for nine days on the Via Francigena Sud from Terracina on the Italian coast.

The Washington Post interviewed many of this smaller group of pilgrims who have been hiking under the blazing Italian sun.  Their stories are diverse, but all share in common their commitment to showing that LGBTQ+ Catholics are indeed Catholics of deep faith.  The Via Francigena Sud is a southern extension of the medieval route that departed from Canterbury in England to Rome. It extends 929 km from Rome to Santa Maria di Leuca. It is worth reading the whole Washington Post article to get more of the significance of this pilgrimage and how it came to be.

Innocenzo Pontillo, president of  La Tenda di Gionata (Jonathan’s Tent,) the Italian LGBTQ+ Catholic association that organized the pilgrimage events told the Washington Post:

“This is a watershed moment. Pope Francis has been accused by his critics of saying many nice things, but having changed nothing. We want to show the church has changed.”

Catholic LGBTQ+ pilgrims carry the rainbow cross into the Church of the Gesu.

The hiking pilgrim group carried a rainbow cross to another important event which happened on the eve of the major pilgrimage today: a two-hour prayer vigil at the Church of the Gesu in Rome, the main church of the Jesuit order, of which Pope Francis was a member.

The cavernous, wildly Baroque church was already filling up when I arrived on the scene about 45 minutes before the service was to begin.  By fifteen minutes before the start, it was standing room only in the back of the church.  Given the fact that probably two dozen countries were represented, the service was a multilingual feast of French, Italian, English, Spanish.  I could only recognize two of the English-speaking leaders of the service:  Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA and a co-chair of the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics, and Father James Martin, SJ, of  Outreach, a Catholic online LGBT+ resource.

The music was joyous and the prayers inspirational.  At the conclusion of the service, all participants were provided with a few seeds, symbolic of the charge to go and plant seeds of the Gospel in our home communities.

Instead of paper prayer aides, everything was online, and the congregation read and sang their parts by following along on their cell phones.  If you would like to see the entire service, click here, and choose the language you prefer. On that same page, you will also find the liturgy outlines of the other prayer events for the pilgrimage.

The prayer service included a rousing congregational singing of “True Colors,” the Cyndi Lauper anthem about being true to oneself.  The closing lines:

“True colors
True colors
Shining through
I see your true colors
And that’s why I love you
So don’t be afraid to let them show
Your true colors
True colors are beautiful
Like a rainbow.”

The Outreach event at the Jesuit Curia in Rome.

Yesterday also featured a moving program sponsored by Outreach,  founded by Father James Martin, SJ.  Entitled “Listening to the Experiencees of LGBTQ Cathoics,” the panel of four speakers was geographically and experientially diverse:

• Ruby Almeida, originally from India, now living in England, she served on the steering committee and Board of Directors of the Global Network on Rainbow Catholics since October 2015.
• Alessandro Ludovico Previti, an artist, cultural consultant, and project coordinator working across Italy and Europe.
• Gonzalo Vilchis, a Mexican business administrator who serves as the director of  Iluminando con Amor (Illuminating with Love).
• Christine Zuba is a transgender Catholic woman who is  a Eucharistic minister at Saints Peter and Paul Parish in Turnersville, New Jersey (joining the panel via Zoom).

Michael O’Loughlin, executive director of Outreach, moderated the event. The panelists each shared their personal stories of hope as LGBTQ Catholics.

The pilgrimage has begun in earnest! Please keep us all in your prayers. I will be praying for all of New Ways Ministry’s supporters and Bondings 2.0 readers.

—Francis DeBernardo, New Ways Ministry, September 6, 2025