November 30, 2025 Essay: All Misfits Welcome
In 2018, at the first retreat held by the LGBT Catholics & Friends ministry, Ellen Stilwell and I independently came up with the same idea of having a Mass at St. Ignatius that would welcome the LGBTQ community. We decided to work together, and we organized a “Mass of Welcome for the LGBT Community and Friends” in early December of that year, close to World AIDS Day, which is on December 1st. We had many of the members of the LGBT ministry involved, but we also had the support of our wonderful music ministry, we had the liturgical dancers on board, all of our parish priests concelebrating, and very importantly, the attendance of people in the congregation who maybe didn’t have skin in the game, but wanted to support what they felt was an important and right message of welcome.
The night was absolutely wonderful. For so many of us, it was the first time we had heard the words “gay” or “lesbian” used in a positive way in church. From the pulpit, we heard our pastor assuring us we were loved by God, telling us that we were welcome and wanted in the church, and inviting us to participate in the parish. Despite fears of possible protest, there was only warmth and beauty that night, and at the reception afterwards, people I didn’t know came up to tell me that it was their first time in years back in the church.
This Mass is now an annual event. Over the last couple of years, it’s lost its novelty, and we see the faces of our ministry members in the pews, but not so many others from the parish. Yet each year, new people find me to tell me the same thing—what a wonderful experience the Mass was for them, and how happy they are to be back in the church where they had felt unwelcome or unworthy before.
I’ve started to think that this might be a type of evangelization, creating a welcoming space for disappointed or discouraged people to return to a church that is now ready to invite them back, in a world where that welcoming message, even from other parts of our church, is unclear or missing altogether. And maybe all of us present at this Mass, and present in this parish, are part of a light that beckons others, inviting those on the margins to come closer to God.
Welcoming the LGBTQ community has shown me how powerful and necessary that light can be, but it has also made me realize that this can be a beginning. The experience of LGBTQ Catholics mirrors the quiet pain carried by so many others who feel like “misfits,” who believe they are too broken, too different, too complicated, or too far from the ideal to belong in church. If we can learn to extend real, intentional hospitality to LGBTQ Catholics, perhaps we can learn to recognize and embrace all those who stand at the edges: divorced and remarried people, single parents, addiction victims, people who have been hurt by the church, and anyone who doubts.
Our Mass of Welcome may have begun with inclusion of the LGBTQ community, but its deeper purpose can be to awaken in us a broader vision of church: one where every person who has ever felt like an outsider can finally hear, and believe, the words, “You are loved. You are wanted. You belong here.” In that sense, this is not just a ministry event, but it is a small, hopeful step toward the kind of church we are all called to build, one where no “misfit” stands on the margins, because the boundaries have been melted away by the warmth of the welcoming love that Christ taught us.
Please join us on Monday, December 1st, at 7 PM in the church for “All Hearts Together: A Mass for the LGBTQ Community.” A reception in Wallace Hall will follow.
— Bruce Rameker, LGBT Catholics & Friends Ministry