The Vatican issued a statement last week in response to a Brazilian priest’s question about marriage and baptism of transgender believers, but the caveat at the end of the statement has rural Pennsylvania-born priest Shannon Kearns skeptical about the Pope’s embrace of trans and gender non-conforming believers.
Kearns, who uses he/him pronouns, is the first openly transgender priest ordained in the Old Catholic tradition, which traces back to the 1800s, said this is a step forward, but there’s still more steps to take before trans and gender non-conforming people are fully accepted by Roman Catholicism.
Pope Francis has made many efforts to include LGBTQ+ people Roman Catholicism– the largest branch of Christianity with about 1.2 billion believers around the world. The Catholic church is the oldest continuously running religious institution in the world, and the second-largest religion behind Sunni Islam.
Nearly half (46%) of of LGBTQ people in America are religious, according to 2020 data from the Williams Institute. Nearly a quarter (24.8%) queer folks who are religious are Roman Catholic–a share that is six percentage points higher than the share of Americans who are Catholic, which stands around 61.9 million people, which represents about 18.7% of the population, according to data from the 2020 U.S. Religion Census.
Other data released this year found more and more young latinx people are leaving the Catholic faith. The share of Latino Americans who say they are religiously “unaffiliated” has nearly doubled in the last decade, with now about half young adult Latinos washing their hands of religious affiliation, according to data from Pew Research Center released in April. People who say they claim no religion or “nothing in particular” are the largest growing religious group among Hispanic Americans.
Pope Francis approved the statement Oct. 31, Vatican News reported. The statement, approved by the Pope, said transgender people “even one who…
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