Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV appeared to give the cold shoulder to a group of 48 transgender women who were excluded from his head table at the Vatican’s annual ‘lunch for the poor’ on Sunday at the Vatican
Their seating away form the Pope marked a break from the access they enjoyed under Pope Francis in recent years and a moment many attendees interpreted as an unmistakable snub.
The women, who had twice been welcomed to Francis’s own table in both 2023 and 2024, were instead seated at separate tables throughout Paul VI Hall.
It saw them lose the prominent place that had become a symbol of the late pontiff’s high-profile outreach to transgender Catholics.
Alessia Nobile, an Italian trans author, said she only managed to hand the new pope a letter before he ‘smiled’ and moved on. Others never got close enough to speak to him at all.
‘That he’d mingle, that he [sat] close to [us], that’s a good sign, right?’ said Nobile who had hoped Pope Leo’s warmth toward her group would match Francis’s.
Nobile said she managed to hand the new pontiff a letter ‘on behalf of the trans community,’ receiving only a smile in return.
Vatican organizers insist there’s no conspiracy and that the seating was random, denying any deliberate slight had occurred.
The widely watched gathering inside the Vatican’s sprawling Paul VI Hall is attended by more than 1,300 migrants, homeless visitors, disabled guests and low-income families.
The lunch was meant to serve as a continuation of the late pontiff’s high-profile outreach to marginalized LGBTQ+ Catholics.
The trans women, many of them Latin Americans from Torvaianica just outside of Rome, had been personally greeted by Francis at papal audiences and seated at his head table in previous years, found themselves clustered at separate tables.
‘He welcomed the guests to ‘this lunch so strongly backed by our much beloved Pope Francis,’ according to the event program, before offering a blessing and settling into a menu of lasagna and chicken cutlets.
It was only when the trans women arrived they found their head-table access had vanished without explanation.
‘We weren’t able to meet the pope,’ acknowledged the Rev. Andrea Conocchia, the liberal priest who ministers to the Torvaianica trans community, ‘but they still ‘had us sit at tables very, very close to the pope.’
Conocchia insisted the atmosphere ‘went well,’ calling it both ‘fraternal’ and ‘joyful.’
In an interview with The Washington Post, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the Vatican’s longtime organizer of the Pope’s charity events, insisted that no slight was intended.
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As expected