ten italian bishops sat down in the jesuit headquarters to talk about how to treat us

via Outreach, Progetto Gionata and the Conferenza Episcopale Calabra.

On Friday 4 September, in the auditorium of the Jesuit headquarters in Rome, about 200 people sat down at half past nine in the morning, read Psalm 86 out loud, and then spent until six in the evening talking about how the Italian Catholic Church should treat gay and trans people.

what the conference was

The conference was called Good Pastoral Practices with Same-Sex Attracted and Transgender Persons. It was the first of its kind in Italy. And the part worth sitting with is who convened it, because it was not a rebel network of parish volunteers. It was the Italian Bishops' Conference, the CEI, the actual institution.

Ten bishops came. Italian reports put it at ten or about a dozen, depending on who was counting heads, alongside roughly 200 priests, religious sisters and brothers, lay people, LGBT+ Italians and their families.

Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, who is the president of the CEI, sent personal greetings through the bishop who now has this ministry as his brief.

what the bishops said

That bishop is Giampaolo Dianin, the Archbishop of Gorizia, and he opened by defining good practice as "the capacity to read the present and live anticipating the future." Later he described where the Church currently is with one Italian word, travaglio. It means labor. Not work, labor, the kind that happens before a birth and hurts the whole time.

Francesco Savino, the CEI's vice president for southern Italy, was in the room and called the LGBTQ+ Jubilee a moment of conversion, which is a specific and not at all decorative word to use in that building. He argued for pastoral work that is generative, built on encounters and relationships and faces rather than positions.

Gherardo Gambelli, the Archbishop of Florence, took part. Four dioceses got up and presented what they are already doing: Cremona, Bari, Florence and Chiavari. Not proposals. Practices, in progress, with results to describe.

Also there: Corrado Contini and his wife Michela, who coordinate a network called 3VolteGenitori, three times parents. It is 19 groups and around 300 Christian parents of LGBT+ children spread across Italy. Somebody had to be the first parent in each of those 19 rooms.

nothing actually changed

Now, the honest part. Nothing was changed. No doctrine moved, no blessing was authorized, nobody's marriage got recognized, and the same Church running this conference still teaches what it teaches about our bodies and our relationships. A day of listening is not a policy.

But we have watched a lot of institutions do the opposite maneuver this year, the one where a hospital or a university or a government agency quietly decides we are too expensive to keep defending. In Rome, ten bishops walked into a building, sat down in front of gay and trans people and their mothers, and let four dioceses explain on the record how they do this well. In a country with no same-sex marriage and a hard-right government, the institution called the meeting itself.

Priest to parent to trans kid, in that order, in an auditorium. It is not the win. It is the shape a win starts out as.