“I Have Converted”: Italian Bishop on How LGBTQ+ People Changed His Pastoral Vision

On September 4, 2026, nearly 200 pastoral workers and approximatelly 10 Italian bishops gathered in Rome for the first national conference for pastoral workers interested in ministering to LGBTQ+ people. Entitled “Good Practices in Pastoral Ministry with Homo-Affective* and Transgender People,” the goal was to share experiences and best practices in ministry with LGBTQ+ people and their families. [See footnote at the end of post about the debate in Italy surrounding the use of this word.]

Among the speakers was Bishop Francesco Savino, who reflected on the need for the Church to restore dignity to LGBTQ+ people, allow itself to be transformed by encounters with them, and move from an organizational to a generative pastoral ministry. He also spoke about the experience of LGBTQ+ priests and called for greater attention to their fears and isolation, while urging Catholics not to pit civil rights against social rights.

Bondings 2.0’s Elisa Belotti translated Bishop Savino’s speech into English.

Bishop Francesco Savino

Good morning, everyone. I am Francesco Savino, Bishop of Cassano all’Jonio and, for the past four years, Vice President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference. In ten months, I will conclude this ministry as Vice President (an undoubtedly significant experience, one of genuine responsibility. Services to the Church can be very beautiful, but sometimes, for obvious reasons, they can also condition you). People are also what they eat, and since it is 1:00 p.m., we need to eat, I only want to make two observations and, schematically, three very quick provocations.

The first observation: I have to express my gratitude for the method that is characterizing our meeting. I am very pleased that we started with good practices.

For those who may not know, I had an experience that, in my humble opinion, was truly beautiful. For me, it was an epiphanic experience, a great revelation, when I experienced the Jubilee together with all those people who became dear to me. The Jubilee in Rome with homo-affective* and transgender people: listening, being among them, sharing. For me, even today, it is one of the most beautiful experiences I cherish.

I have converted. Óscar Romero used to say: “The people converted me.” We must allow ourselves to be converted by events, by the signs of the times, people, stories, faces turned toward us, as the great father Tonino Bello [an Italian Catholic bishop, writer, and pacifist, renowned for his strong social commitment to the poor] would say, in whose school I was formed for at least seven or eight years.

I want to say immediately that these good practices that have been shared with us are not protocols to be filed away, but names, stories of men and women; they are faces that knocked on the doors of our communities, sometimes with fear, sometimes carrying deep wounds, and who, by providence, found someone who had the courage to open the door, let them in, offer them a chair and a listening ear.

Bishop Francesco Savino blessing the congregation during the baptismal rite at the LGBTQ+ Jubilee Mass in 2025.

This morning we heard four beautiful stories, with all their problematic knots. But for me, these are four stories that become paradigmatic, that become experiences of the Spirit and experiences of encounter for me in my being a bishop, but even before that, in my being a citizen and a believer.

I am convinced that when the Church becomes flesh, when we become flesh, the Gospel becomes credible again. Today we, as a Church, have a major issue: credibility. If today the priority is the transmission of faith and we must ask ourselves “Who evangelizes whom?,” for me, there is a second major issue that accompanies us and concerns us all: the credibility of the Church today.

We are not credible to many people, above all because we too suffer, as politics does today, from “announcement-itis”: we announce, but there is no corresponding consistency in our actions. Today people are no longer willing to accept our paradoxical inconsistencies.

A second observation. I have to thank Father Luca [Lunardon]. In fact, I would ask you for the slides and the text of your reflection, because I consider what you told us about the principle of pastoral ministry today to be fundamental. What you said, in my view, sets in motion a process of change in pastoral ministry.

If pastoral ministry consists in creating the conditions for men and women to experience the decisive encounter of their lives, the encounter with Jesus, I often have the impression that pastoral ministry has become more of a technique, a method, or an organization than a generative experience.

In my humble opinion, we need to move from organizational pastoral ministry to generative pastoral ministry. As long as our pastoral ministries are merely organizational, they will generate nothing: they will truly be sterile and risk becoming self-centered, narcissistic, and pathological forms of pastoral ministry. I say this with great sincerity and empathy!

A fundamental characteristic of pastoral ministry is understanding that it is made up of relationships, encounters, and faces that cross paths and meet one another.

The rainbow cross which led the LGBTQ+ Jubilee Pilgrimage in 2025.

I am very glad that you, Father Luca  [Father Gianluca Carrega, the Archdiocese of Turin’s coordinator for LGBT+ ministry\ mentioned Christoph Theobald [a French priest and theologian, based in Germany, and a member of the Society of Jesus]. I have read Urgences pastorales, and that book positively changed my perspective as a pastor, inviting me to question the pastoral ministry we practice.

Allow me to say that this way of doing pastoral ministry that you have proposed to us needs to be cultivated and allowed to mature. I would add that this way of doing pastoral ministry must also be asked for and invoked in prayer, so as to avoid becoming neo-Pelagians [Christians who believe they can attain salvation and perfection using only their own strength and abilities].

I remember that, during the time of Pope Benedict XVI, I was looking for a book by Karl Rahner. I love Karl Rahner. I went to the Vatican Bookstore and could not find a single book by Karl Rahner. Then, as soon as Bergoglio became pope, many books by Karl Rahner appeared. That is how we are: we follow trends, more or less. Let us be careful!

I now come to three small provocations.

The first. I appreciated the final reflection offered by my brother in the episcopate, Bishop [Giampaolo] Dianin [Archbishop of Gorizia], whom I hold in high regard and who has helped us greatly, also within the Calabrian Bishops’ Conference, of which I am a member, to understand what approach to take in our seminaries. The reflection concerning dignity.

Here, we all have a great task. I said it during the Jubilee: it is time to restore dignity to everyone, especially to those who have been denied it.

Homo-affective* people have been denied the dignity of being persons. We must acknowledge that this also happened because of some of our preaching, described by you in a certain way. I do not want to define it myself, otherwise we might open a dispute…

We must restore dignity. Beyond all the anthropologies, sociologies, philosophies, and theologies, here we need to restore dignity to transgender and same-sex-attracted* people.

One of the people I have met in my life who converted me – Don Mimmo Chiarantoni is also here (my parish vicar), and he can confirm this experience– was a transsexual person who opened up a different way of looking at life for me, for him [Chiarantoni], and for the community.

Her stage name was Laura, and we also published her poems [in a limited print edition for a local parish]. She was a transsexual person who changed my life and my outlook on life. We accompanied her when she became ill with AIDS. She died of AIDS, and we buried her in the cemetery of the town where I was serving as a parish priest, in Bitonto, in the province of Bari.

So let us be careful: let us restore dignity to those from whom we too have taken it away.

A second provocation. I understand that I am opening an extremely difficult and problematic chapter. I say this to my brother priests and brother bishops: has the time not come to help same-sex-attracted* priests not to live out their ministry in a blocked and tightly guarded way, burdened by fear and by the fear of being judged?

I will try to say this to you with great sincerity, and I say it as a lesson for myself: I have a lot of dialogue with homo-affective* priests, helping them to be themselves.

There are homo-affective* brother priests: what is the problem? A great monk of Bose, Father Giancarlo Bruni, a Servant of Mary, says that what matters is that both heterosexual and homosexual people seek to be consistent and faithful to what they promised on the day of their ordination. Period.

There is too much prejudice, there are too many prejudices. I see homosexual brother priests living in fear of judgment and afraid of being discovered because they are homosexual. They often live in enormous solitude.

A third provocation. I am very bitter, angry, with certain politicians who, merely to miserably gain a few more votes, have put the so-called woke issue back at the center, saying: “No, this is an issue that must be excluded from politics.”

If, in the third millennium, we return to pitting civil rights against social rights, we will never get out of it, and we will turn back the hands of history, toward the darkest periods of our Italian Republic and of Europe.

Let us be careful, I tell you: let us be careful! I say this to myself as well. Let us not pit civil rights against social rights. They are both fundamental rights of the person.

Social rights are as important as civil rights, because if we go back to pitting them against each other, civilization becomes merely a word in the dictionary and democracy takes steps backward.

Thank you all.

*Translator’s note: The Italian conference title and Bishop Savino used the word “omoaffettivo” (homo-affective), which is a hotly contested word choice in Italy. Some prefer “omosessuale” (“homosexual”), arguing that “omoaffettivo” stresses the emotional dimension but removes the sexual dimension from the word, which can contribute to the idea that same-sex relationships are acceptable so long as they are framed primarily in terms of affection rather than sexuality. This would be a particularly relevant concern in a Church context, where the sexual dimension of same-sex relationships has often been treated as the main source of discomfort. Others prefer “omoaffettivo” precisely because it shifts the focus away from the hypersexualization of LGBTQ+ people, particularly gay men, and toward the affective and relational dimension of their lives and relationships.