Long-Time Leader of DignityUSA Announces Plan to Retire

Marianne Duddy-Burke

After more than 40 years serving a major national Catholic LGBTQ+ organization, and nearly 20 as executive director, Marianne Duddy-Burke has announced her plans to retire from DignityUSA.

In an interview after Dignity announced the news Duddy-Burke told Gay City News hat retirement has been “a long time coming.” 

“We’re constantly scanning the environment in which DignityUSA operates, our chapters, our members, and what we are facing,” Duddy-Burke said. “I have believed for a long time that the changes in the queer community — in religious affiliation, in the Catholic Church — call for a different generation of leadership.”

In her decades of advocacy work with DignityUSA, Duddy-Burke, a married lesbian with two adopted children, one of whom is trans, has frequently served “as the top spokesperson for the organization in commenting on major developments tied to LGBTQ people and the church,” according to the news interview article.

At the same time that DignityUSA has been critical of the church’s policies towards the LGBTQ community, under her guidance,“Duddy-Burke also found ways…to engage with church leadership where possible in an effort to improve the landscape for queer people.” 

Pope Francis greets Marianne Duddy-Burke in St. Peter’s Square Oct. 25, 2023, at the Vatican. (Courtesy of Marianne Daddy-Burke)

In addition to her work with DignityUSA, Duddy-Burke has served as co-chair of the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics (GNRC), an international LGBTQ+ alliance. In 2023, she was part of a delegation of GNRC representatives who met Pope Francis. She recalls that the experience“gave so much hope to queer people around the world. Being able to speak with him as another member of the church and remind him of our responsibility for the lives of our people was an unimaginable moment that came from decades of advocacy by so many people.”

Duddy-Burke has held a variety of leadership roles at Dignity, including as its first female president from 1993-1997. She recalled:

“When I first started with Dignity and national leadership, we were still in an era when the names of people arrested in gay bars were published in newspapers and teachers would lose their jobs and parents would lose their access to their children. And many gay and lesbian people were in opposite-sex marriages either because they didn’t know they were gay at the time because there just wasn’t the visibility of the community that we have now, or they were afraid of the legal ramifications or the ability to get employment. We are in such a different culture now than when I got started in this movement.”

Duddy-Burke navigated through some of the most critical moments in queer history with DignityUSA, from the AIDS crisis to achieving federal marriage equality. She calls the HIV/AIDS epidemic a “long painful moment” that represented the failure of government, religion, and culture. She remembers the advocacy work DignityUSA did ensuring victims of the crisis received treatment and care, and recalls the many times she “would sit with family members who learned their kids were gay and dying — all in the same sentence.”

Like other LGBTQ+ Catholic leaders, Duddy-Burke was “cautiously optimistic” at the election of Pope Leo in 2025. Duddy-Burke says he “seems to be taking a broadly Catholic social justice agenda.”

The current president of DignityUSA, Meli Barber, praised Duddy-Burke’s years of service in a statement:

“Marianne has been more than an extremely able executive director. Her care for and ministry to [Dignity] chapters, her deep personal relationships with countless Dignity members, her connections to LGBTQIA+ Catholics around the world, the relationships she has built with other progressive Catholic organizations, her skill as a public representative, the respect with which she is universally regarded, and her tireless devotion to service all leave an indelible mark. It is not an exaggeration to say that she has shaped not only Dignity but a generation of LGBTQIA+ Catholics.”

Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, which has partnered with Dignity USA for many decades, praised Duddy-Burke’s unique style of activism:

“Marianne has the unique ability to blend the personal and the political.  She is as concerned with the suffering of an LGBTQ+ person she knows personally as she is with the pain caused by negative church pronouncements and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and policies. Her departure is a significant loss to the Catholic LGBTQ+ world, but I’m confident that the new generation of Dignity leaders she has mentored will provide the organization with a strongly capable new director.”

Duddy-Burke will remain as executive director until the organization chooses her successor, and will assist them in the transition. She commented about her next steps: 

“I don’t know what the timeline is,. I still plan to work for several more years, but I don’t know in what capacity. There are not a lot of married lesbian moms in church leadership these days. I know I want to continue doing justice work, but I feel very peaceful that the right work for me will be clear at the right time.”

—Lynnzee Dick, New Ways Ministry, October 2, 2026