Thinking about swimming the Tiber? Think twice...

 By Jules Gomes Published on August 19, 2025 at The Stream

Marking a historic first, the Vatican is officially recognizing group pilgrimages of LGBT+ Catholics as participants in Rome’s Jubilee Year events while Pope Leo XIV prepares to host a radical group dedicated to overturning biblical teaching on sexual morality.

Pro-LGBT+ Catholics are applauding the Vatican’s openness in arranging for Leo to meet with one of the Catholic Church’s most extreme lobby groups, We Are Church, which has been invited to the Vatican by Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the Synod on Synodality.

The Italian bishops’ media outlet, L’Avvenire, confirmed on August 14 that Grech, one of the highest-ranking cardinals in the Vatican, has invited eight members from We Are Church to join the Jubilee Year events scheduled for October 26-28.

The movement is “known for its radical demands for ecclesial reform,” the bishops’ newspaper acknowledged, including the ordination of women, the freedom to use artificial contraception, the full inclusion of homosexuals in the Church, and optional priestly celibacy.

LGBT+ Leaders Rejoice Over Vatican Welcome

“We are delighted with this opportunity. There is much anticipation for this meeting, and even a certain amount of joy,” said Elza Ferrario, spokesperson for the Italian branch of the campaign group. “We are a reformist movement that hasn’t always had good relations with the institutional Church, so we are pleased to hear words of esteem.”

The pilgrimage is called: “Church: Home for All, LGBT+ Christians and Other Existential Frontiers.”

“Our patient work over 30 years, during which we have often been present in Rome at bishops’ synods, council commemorations, papal elections, and other events, may have contributed to this,” We Are Church cofounder Christian Weisner told Vatican News. “I also see the passage through the Holy Door as a sign for the Church as a whole: to leave mistakes behind and to set out again and again in Christian hope.”

The Jubilee 2025 website explains that the Holy Door in designated basilicas “is the most powerful sign of the Jubilee” and “passing through the Holy Door expresses the decision to follow and be guided by Jesus, who is the Good Shepherd.”

In Catholic understanding, pilgrims who pass through the Holy Door do so with repentant hearts and a genuine desire to change their lives. Conservative Catholics have objected to the weaponization of the Holy Door symbolism by LGBT+ groups that intend to subvert its meaning by calling upon the Church instead to repent for its biblical position on homosexuality.

Conservative Catholics Blast Holy Year Weaponization

“The practice of homosexuality is a very serious moral transgression condemned by Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium of the Church,” writes Italian historian Roberto Mattei.

If a homosexual repents of his sin and confesses, he can certainly pass through the Holy Door, entrusting himself to the mercy of God for the remission of the punishments due to his sins, but he does not need to do so with fanfare, and much less in an organized group.

Official participation in the Jubilee by an association of homosexuals, which does not have the goal of their conversion but rather justifies their conduct, has a clear instrumental intent: that of making it appear that the Church has changed its judgment on homosexuality.

The historian is calling upon Vatican authorities to “prevent these instrumentalizations” and reiterate “the incompatibility that exists between the Holy Year and moral transgression asserted as a right” lest “become complicit in the moral violation that they fail to condemn.”

Meanwhile, several Catholic LGBT+ groups have announced that they will be participating with the Vatican’s approval in the Jubilee Year services. The Vatican is officially listing their participation listed in the Jubilee Year Calendar, scandalizing Catholics who remain faithful to the Church’s traditional teaching on homosexuality.

That teaching, however, suffered a serious setback after Pope Francis permitted priests to offer nonliturgical blessings to same-sex couples in his 2023 declaration Fiducia Supplicans.

Bishop Will Celebrate Mass for Global LGBT+ Pilgrims

On August 12, LGBT+ Catholics Westminster’s Younger Adults Group members and others from LGBT+ Catholics Westminster announced that they will join pilgrims from the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics, the European Forum of LGBTI+ Christian Groups, Roman Catholic member groups, and a large number of Italian LGBT+ Catholic groups in Rome.

“For the first time in church history, LGBTQ+ Catholic groups are getting ready to participate in the Jubilee, not in spite of their queerness, but through it,” noted New Ways Ministry, a pro-LGBT+ Catholic campaign group.

On September 5, LGBT+ pilgrims will join in a Prayer Vigil, which will be “a time for everyone to be recognized in their uniqueness.” The next day, LGBT+ pilgrims will be guided through the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica with Bishop Francesco Savino of Cassano all’Jonio celebrating Mass for LGBT+ groups at the Church of the Gesù, the mother church of the Jesuit order.

In an interview on the Feast of the Assumption, Savino said that LGBT+ groups participating in the Jubilee “is like a bell ringing loudly in the deafening silence of exclusion: a clear, strong and irreversible signal that reminds us that the Gospel is not a manifesto for a few elected, but a love letter addressed to the entire human family.

“It is not a question of ‘hosting’ someone in the house of the Lord, but of recognizing that everyone is already a full inhabitant,” the prelate said. “In the beating heart of the Eucharist — which is the very heart of the Gospel — nobody is a foreigner, nobody is excluded, nobody is invisible.”

Faithful Roman Catholics need to speak up now or forever hold their peace.