The pope is visited by transgender people at his general audiences. He has gone to a permanent carnival park to visit the Little Sisters of Jesus who bring these trans people to him. And he chats with some of his trans visitors by email. However improbable it may seem, this is something that has happened and been happening.
Of course, you may very well have heard of part of this story, but there’s a good chance you weren’t aware of the connection to the spiritual family of Saint Charles de Foucauld. And if you knew of the connection, you almost certainly didn’t know the wild story of how it all came about. The background hasn’t been properly researched and presented in the press and the media. To make up for the deficiencies, this post relates as much of the full and inside story as I have been able to put together. It’s an unusual foray into journalism for this blog, but the story is relevant, and nobody else has told it the way it deserves to be told.
The story in the media thus far
About a year ago, it became known that Pope Francis had been welcoming trans people at the Wednesday General Audiences. The first four such meetings were the audiences of April 27, June 22, August 3, and August 10, 2022, according to L’Osservatore Romano.[1] There was quite a lot of news reporting on this at the time. Most of the news reports that I saw mentioned the connection to a “Sister Geneviève Jeanningros,” but although a few of those news reports did clarify that she was one of the “Little Sisters” (never explicitly stated, as far as I know, as Little Sisters of Jesus), most did not. It could be that part of the reason for this silence was to avoid too much of a fallout that such a small order and community could never be able to cope with. There is always a risk of turning into a focal point for opposition, sadly, and nobody would wish that on these Sisters!
At any rate, in a conversation with Jesuits in Portugal that was recently published in La Civiltà Cattolica, Pope Francis gave quite a few details on how these trans people came to be visiting him. He confirmed publicly that the connection was via “a Charles de Foucauld sister”:
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With thanks to Contemplative in the Mud and Benjamin Embley, where this article originally appeared.
