June 1, 2025 Essay: Open Letter to Parish Families
We are members of the LGBT Catholics and Friends ministry at the parish, and we are writing to urge you to talk with your children and grandchildren in hopes of bringing greater awareness of the plight of homeless LGBT youth.
The month of June is Pride Month, and the Pope’s prayer intention for this month is for Compassion: “Let us pray that each one of us might find consolation in a personal relationship with Jesus, and from his Heart, learn to have compassion on the world.” It seems like a providential time, as the Church mourns the passing of Pope Francis and celebrates the election of Pope Leo XIV, to express respect, compassion, and sensitivity.
Our ministry focuses on faith, prayer, and service to our community. It provides opportunities for spiritual enrichment, builds community through fellowship, sharing and support, and strives to serve our community through volunteer opportunities focusing on LGBT people, their needs, and concerns.
You may or may not know that LGBT youths—children, really—comprise a large percentage of the overall population of homeless youths in the US. Through our interactions with people that offer care and counseling to this group of homeless children, we must distressingly acknowledge that many come from Christian families who have thrown them out because of their sexual orientation. Many people have the idea that their Catholic faith deems their children to be sinful because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. As a consequence, instead of listening to their child, the family ostracizes the child or worse, rejects them and throws them out of their homes. Rather than supporting their child or sibling or grandchild, they abandon them. Now more alone than ever, it is not uncommon for LGBT young people to run away from a Christian home or to be pushed out, through verbally harsh and sometimes, physical abuse, by family members.
With nowhere to turn, many kids wind up on the streets without a place to sleep. The streets are not a place for kids, many of whom are prostituted, drawn into substance abuse, and/or suffer mental health challenges. And many kids, feeling abandoned, commit suicide. Kids deserve better from all of us. They deserve the love, care, and the comfort of a home, all of which are instrumental in a child’s development—emotionally, physically, mentally and in the building of their faith. They need family and parental support and understanding.
While lay organizations assist homeless youths, and ministries such as ours reach out where we are able, we want to try to reduce runaways by changing the way their families react to LGBT kids. Parents and families need to hear from their Church that LGBT children should be loved, cherished, and respected, that their LGBT kids are beloved children of God. This topic is not an easy one and is likely the reason why rarely, if ever, this message of God’s love is specifically addressed to this population of his children,
In an interview on this subject, Pope Francis encouraged parents to love their LGBT children: “God is Father, and he does not disown any of his children.” He continued by saying, “The church is a mother and calls together all her children…. Take for example the parable of those invited to the feast: ‘the just, the sinners, the rich and the poor, etc.’ [Matthew 22:1-15; Luke 14:15-24]. A ‘selective’ church, one of ‘pure blood,’ is not Holy Mother Church, but rather a sect.”
Our hope is that this message will be shared among the members of the parish. Our intent is to foster greater awareness to this issue, and to urge you to help facilitate change by sharing a different narrative—our God loves LGBT kids.
We hope you will consider speaking out and making our Church’s welcome of all persons clear, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Sincerely yours,
LGBT Catholics and Friends Ministry