Pope urged at LGBT meeting to reverse church ban on gender-affirming care

By Joshua McElwee

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis faced calls to overturn the Catholic Church's ban on gender-affirming care for transgender people on Saturday when he held talks with LGBTQ activists at the Vatican.

The 80-minute meeting, held privately at the guesthouse where the pope lives, included a Catholic sister who works with LGBTQ people, a member of the transgender community, and a U.S. medical doctor who helps run a clinic providing gender-affirming hormonal care for adults.

"I really wanted to share with Pope Francis about the joy that I have being a transgender Catholic person," Michael Sennett, who took part in the meeting, told Reuters.

Sennett, a transgender man from Boston, said he told the pontiff about "the joy that I get from hormone replacement therapy and the surgeries that I've had that make me feel comfortable in my body".

The unusual encounter was not listed on the Vatican's official agenda of the pope's meetings for the day.

The meeting with around a dozen LGBT activists comes six months after the Vatican's doctrinal office firmly rejected gender-affirming care, saying it "risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception".

LGBTQ groups sharply criticized the Vatican document and said the doctrinal office did not seek input from transgender people about their experiences before rejecting gender-affirming care.

"We expressed that as the church makes policies in this area that it's very important to speak with transgender individuals," said Cynthia Herrick, an endocrinologist at a St. Louis, Missouri, clinic who took part in the papal meeting.

"The pope was very receptive," said Herrick. "He listened very empathetically. He also shared that he always wants to focus on the person, the well-being of the person."

Francis, who is 87, has been credited with leading the Catholic Church into taking a more welcoming approach towards the LGBTQ community, and has allowed priests to bless same-sex couples on a case-by-case basis.

But earlier this year he also used a highly derogatory Italian term about LGBTQ people, for which the Vatican apologised on his behalf.

New Ways Ministry, a U.S.-based advocacy group for LGBTQ Catholics, organised Saturday's event.

"The message really is that we need to listen to the experiences of transgender people," said Sister Jeannine Gramick, the group's co-founder, who asked Francis for the encounter. The meeting "means that the church is coming along, the church is joining the modern era," she said.

Gramick's work with LGBTQ Catholics has attracted the ire of Vatican and U.S. Catholic officials for decades, including Pope Benedict XVI. But she has developed a correspondence with Francis, who first welcomed her for a meeting at the Vatican last year.

The Vatican's press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Saturday's meeting.

(Reporting by Joshua McElwee; Editing by Mike Harrison)