Reconciliation and acceptance of LGBT+ people, a challenge for the Jubilee Church of Pope Francis

Estratto* dell’intervista di Barbara Marini a Innocenzo Pontillo, presidente de La a tenda di Gionata, pubblicata su VITA.it, Third Sector platform, on 7 December 2024

September 6, 2025 will be an important date for the Jubilee announced by Pope Francis which will begin on Christmas Eve with the opening of the Holy Door. The jubilee calendar made public, in fact, as per tradition, includes themed pilgrimages, with realities, movements, categories, associations, which evoke experiences, professions and missions as a synthesis of the entire and varied humanity that inhabits the Catholic Church, in all its facets and vocations: elderly, young people, lay people, nuns, mothers, lawyers, surveyors, even musical bands. Each with its own name.

The Jubilee pilgrimage of September 6, 2025 had a great resonance since it will be the day dedicated to LGBT+ people and their families and, although the dialogue between these realities and the Church has begun for some time, it will be the first time in such an authoritative and also popular historical moment, that they will walk together towards the door of reconciliation.

Innocenzo Pontillo è un fisioterapista che vive in Toscana e lavora con gli anziani. È sua e dei soci de La tenda di Gionta, l’associazione di cui è presidente, la decisione di scrivere in Vaticano «seguendo i canali ufficiali» per chiedere di poter partecipare con l’associazione di cui fa parte, insieme ad altre, al pellegrinaggio, proprio come una realtà che vuole riconoscersi ed essere riconosciuta nella comunità dei credenti.

We interviewed him to shed light on the motivations, beyond any ideological principle, to understand and learn about the reality of LGBT people who are believers. He says that ten years ago, he would have denied the publication of his name for fear of being recognized and fired.

Her husband is a traffic policeman and both are Catholics who want to live their beliefs within the Church. His journey of faith is adult «I was born in the Catholic Church, I received the sacraments there, but due to my condition I had distanced myself. One evening I went as a challenge to a working group on the Bible, I was there to dismantle piece by piece, with my experience, what the Church was saying. And instead I realized that the purpose of Christianity was the happiness of man, so I began my true journey of faith."

From the web to real life

With the association Jonathan's Tent we try to delve deeper into the message of the Bible and the Gospels and we collaborate with dioceses, with organizations and movements to make people's stories and the responses of faith known. They study these topics, to overcome the "fake news" on these topics that abound in our churches.

Gionata's tent was born in 2018 from an intuition of an elderly priest, Don David from Fermo (Marche), who before dying discovered the portal gionata.org online, founded by volunteers to tell who these believers are, what they behind this mysterious acronym LGBT+ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans) and what they seek in faith.

When this priest, reading the stories, realized the mistakes he had made as a priest, before he died, he asked those who had been his testamentary curators to contact our volunteers to ask us to do in the world what we were already doing on the web" .

Proposing a path of faith in reality for people who, often and with wounds, felt excluded from the Church was the aim. And how did you make it?

First of all, listening and welcoming people. Then we entered public life, there was a need for training for the clergy and for us. We went into Christian communities to provide the tools.

I remember that when "the tent" was born, it was 2018, it was a different time, there was another church then, the journey began. We went to the Pope twice and began a series of collaborations with some dioceses with various initiatives.

To end at the Jubilee…

When the Jubilee was announced, just like any association that accompanies people, we said to ourselves that we had to go. We wrote to the Jubilee secretariat, via the website and in an official manner, telling us who we were.
Then we learned that our application had been accepted, and to the 6 September 2025, at 3pm the jubilee pilgrimage of Jonathan's tent will start, which will be like all the pilgrimages that will start during the Year of Saints. We will be there together with all the associations who know our path and those who want to join. Ours was a simple gesture, we simply asked to be able to participate. That's all. As theologian Elizabeth Green says “it is the margin that changes the center, never the opposite".

What meaning does this gesture have for you?

A very deep meaning. The Jubilee is the moment of reconciliation and the moment in which we start again. An ecclesial moment that the whole Church is moving towards reconciliation. It's a time when we all need to begin to reconcile ourselves to what was.

Couldn't it be labeling oneself, participating as an LGBT group, in an event where being Christian is enough?

«As an association we exist to accompany and live their journey of faith with these people. Ours is the pilgrimage of "Jonata's tent and other associations", which in reality are mostly very different groups that accompany these people, together with many nuns and parish priests with their own parish. We will accompany them with them.

Then we don't care whether journalists want to use the acronym LGBT+ or cause controversy. But I realized that acronyms are useful for minorities, because they serve to say: "so you know who I am". God himself always gives names to his creatures and calls them by name. Therefore if you give news of a strike, they are not "those over there", but they are, for example, the metalworkers... This is why an acronym is sometimes necessary.

The label is always a way of defining someone as if to “reassure” oneself…

If we scroll through the list of the various approved Jubilee pilgrimages, we see all the "labels" of the movements, of the various dioceses. Everyone rightly qualifies for what they are on the pilgrimage, because they are part of the people of God.

The Jubilee is ecclesial because it concerns the whole Church, it is a unifying moment: we simply asked for the pilgrimage of Jonathan's Tent, with the people we accompany who are not artists or surveyors.

This is our specificity, we are on an existential periphery, a word very dear to the Pope, and we try to help the Church walk together with this reality.

For us it is simply a piece of the church, whether majority or minority, a little piece that will go together with many other little pieces on a pilgrimage to the Holy Door, then the others will read it as they want.

We are part of the Church and as such we are called to be there: many of those who will be on pilgrimage with us are teachers, catechists, they are part of the scouts, of the Catholic action, there will be some gay couples, there is the world that c 'is in the Church.

There will be those who are in the church, who have lived and live hospitality and walk in the Church, it is not that they are somewhere else and in another era.

Is it more difficult today to proclaim one's homosexuality or one's membership in the Church?

The interviewee laughs. «Citing a biblical verse I could say that LGBT people are an earthenware vessel among iron vessels. In the sense that sometimes it is a problem to say that you are LGBT in the Church: you are not at ease when you say that you are an LGBT person or have an LGBT child, because some Christian environments do not like it and know how to make you feel uncomfortable.

Often the people we accompany have had to go away from their movements or leave their parish because the welcome is not always implemented.

On the contrary, when you say that you are a believer or have an LGBT child in secular society, even there it is as if you were returning from a concentration camp. But they are simply believers who want to make their own journey.

So isn't being a believer still a minus in a de-Christianized society?

When you live on the margins the question is what you are and whether you mean it. If you follow a serious path, people respect you, they have no problems, and it is easier to find a person who understands you and welcomes you into our society.

When you do things seriously or when they realize that you believe in what you say, that above all you live it without making big proclamations.

Probably in our society, Christianity is often confused with theories, with gender, with great proclamations, but if you help a poor person, if you try to live what the Gospel tells us, up until now I have always found respect and attention, often more from non-believing people than in believing circles. It may seem strange, but many people who do not experience the religious dimension respect it, because they see its full depth.

We must therefore be credible in what we are...

It is an important reflection that concerns churches if they want to be believed and be credible. But it is a topic that concerns everyone, but especially us who believe in something that cannot be seen or touched.

What is the most frequent and greatest wound you encounter in dialogue with the people you accompany within the Church?

Jonathan's tent has an online listening service called "I trust you". All believers who need to be listened to or discussed write to us via email, there is a group of volunteers who listen to them and then directs them to priests, nuns, psychologists, depending on what their difficulties are.

I tell you that the biggest difficulty we see is still welcoming LGBT+ people. In many Christian realities there is an effort to realize it, but it is something that is only emerging now. We can count the dioceses that provide pastoral care for LGBT people on one hand.

The wounds of listening, the difficulties of talking about it, being the victim of this taboo is the great problem that we still see. But something is changing: there are meetings, initiatives for gay people who are in couples, who often also sit on pastoral councils. There are parents who, after their children's coming out, talk about it in their Christian communities, which often rally around them.

Compared to the past, in which this issue was not addressed, there are Catholic movements that are making a process of welcoming, such as the Focolarini with commissions, meetings, but also the Catholic scouts and Catholic Action is moving. A lot depends on where you live.

Some Catholic realities may not exclude you, they may not push you away but you can't talk about it. A welcome like this in the past would have been revolutionary, but now with Pope Francis and in the world we live in, things are changing. Today's world pushes us to be authentic.

But do you also deal with new rights (marriage, adoption)?

We are neither for nor against. We welcome people in the situation they are in.

To save their faith?

For them to live their lives to the fullest! The Gospel wants people who live fully. The phrase we have on the t-shirt with which we went to the Pope, which is the guiding phrase of the association, is: “In love there is no fear”. If even the Pope says “chi am I to judge”, who are we to judge… the Church will show us the way.

However, you go to a Pope who also spoke of "faggotness"!

The Pope learned this Italian word and the question is: "who did he learn it from?". It helps us understand how certain Church circles talk about these issues. It's actually a joking word, and in my opinion, it made us understand perfectly what we already know: that unfortunately the seminaries at the moment, with the current crisis of vocations (basically heterosexual people go there less and less), are continuing to actually gather problematic people who need a place to take refuge.

They often gather people who come from Catholic environments that are very harsh on homosexuality, who therefore go to seminaries to hide and when they leave there they become complicated people to manage. We have forgiven him this word because it describes a world that unfortunately we see!.

The church is mocked by a certain LGBT world... and how are you in it?

We try to be a bridge between realities that do not speak to each other. It is true that the church is mocked but there is more and more talk of its changes, it is not just the voice of Pope Francis. Of course, the Catholic Church has been harsh and disrespectful in reducing homosexual love to the sexual act, because telling a person that they cannot love means making that person experience a tragedy.

All the people who attack the Catholic Church have often been hurt by it, because they were born into it. When there are moments in which we present ourselves in meetings, trans, gay and lesbian people often approach us to tell us about the wounds inflicted on them by the Catholic Church but also their thirst for faith.

La Chiesa cattolica quando andrà ad accogliergli o a chiedergli perdono? Con la Tenda di Gionata andiamo al “Pride” per questo… per cercare queste persone che hanno una fede, che non riescono a vivere nella loro comunità cristiana. Se andassimo a cercare di più queste persone, invece di lamentarci perché nessuno va più in chiesa, saremmo più vivi come comunità cristiana.

However, there is also ideological pollution on these issues from which the Church must defend itself, because they are very politicized issues

This is true. But churchmen must make the effort to know this reality. For example, transsexuality is unknown. They don't know how transgender people live, how many times we save them from suicide, from parents who throw them out of the house, they don't know the dramas they have to go through to get a registered letter from the post office... You have to know who and what you're talking about.

So what do you want for this Jubilee?

It is a moment of conciliation, therefore, this is how we live it. It is beautiful that the Church has decided to say "yes" to this Jubilee pilgrimage, because it is an indication that those things that are continuously said by Pope Francis are, little by little, changing the mentality in the institution and are bringing down the walls that they have been raised over the centuries.

On the day of our pilgrimage of Jonathan's Tent I expect to be able to walk with LGBT+ people, their families and the workers who accompany them and with all the people of God, because that is an ecclesial moment.

The dream of an LGBT+ Christian person is to be able to live and be what they are, in the reality that surrounds them. Being able to introduce your partner to your work colleagues, being able to talk to your community about the person you love, being able to be yourself. Living a double life is very difficult. Everyone wants to be as God created them. You can't tell a tree "grow but do not flourish".

We will be there on a pilgrimage to experience an ecclesial moment and to live the faith in our Church, because only in this way will the walls fall. We want to be reconciled and we want our Church to be reconciled with us.

* This transcription of the telephone interview has been reviewed by the interviewee, it has not undergone changes but some words unfortunately linked to a spoken interlocution and not written have been edited out.