Catholic LGBTQ Community
Pittsburgh, PA
The Welcome Table
You Are God's Beloved Child
The Welcome Table Catholic LGBTQ Community includes LGBTQ people who are active, struggling, and former Catholics, as well as families and allies. Led by the Holy Spirit we work to create a space of genuine hospitality and openness where questions may be asked, experiences shared, wounds healed, and spiritual lives deepened without fear of judgment based on one's sexual orientation or gender identity.
The Welcome Table is a community where we can bring our whole selves to God and each other as gifts to share in love.
We are so glad you found us! Peace and courage surround you.
The Welcome Table
Welcome to Ordinary Time
As you may know, the weeks in the Church liturgical year between the Christmas season and the beginning of Lent are called "ordinary" time. This doesn't mean it's less interesting! "Ordinary" comes from the Latin word "ordinal" which means numbered. Seasons of preparation like Advent and Lent can be hard work spiritually, and we can't feast all the time! Ordinary time lets us settle into a regular routine while still looking for ways to grow spiritually. When explaining this season to children catechists often call it "the growing time."
A "Growing Time" Challenge for LGBTQ Catholics: Who Else is in the Back Row?
As a person who lives and ministers with others on the "edges" of the Catholic Church proper, I often find myself sitting in the back row at Mass. Although disconcerting for someone used to holding a central role in parish life, this feeling of discomfort and isolation is exactly what most LGBTQ Catholics and families live 24/7. And LGBTQ people are not the only ones sitting (literally or figuratively) near the door. Black Catholics, some of whom are LGBTQ or families, are there as well. Being a part of The Welcome Table community entails working to recognize, listen to, and connect with all who exist on the margins of Church and society. For those of us who are white, this means not only understanding our unearned privilege and how it has come at the unfathomable cost of the subjugation of our Black siblings, but also the dehumanizing effect racism has had on us and the gifts of communal life we have (consciously or not) deprived ourselves of to propagate this evil. As we celebrate the memory of one of the greatest Christian martyrs on January 20, let's stretch ourselves to learn from others in the back pew as a growing time challenge.
LGBTQ Events and News
Women and Priests-Conversations in the Spirit
Understanding and honoring the lived experience of our LGBTQ+ Catholic siblings, parents, family, priests, and allies: Rising to the call of being a listening Church
Wednesday, February 5th, 2025, at 3pm EST
Speakers:
Yunuen Trujillo is a Catholic lay minister, faith-based community organizer, and an immigration attorney.
Bryan Massingale (pictured below) is a Catholic priest, author, activist, and professor in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham University.
Joyce Calvo’s daughter, Alana Chen, died from suicide on Dec. 8, 2019.
Bishop John Stowe will join our call, be on our Q & A panel, and lead us in closing prayer.
Event hosts, the Women in the Church Working Group of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests (AUSCP), seek to give space for listening deeply to the testimony of sisters and brothers who sometimes experience a judgmental Church instead of a listening and welcoming Church. This call is being hosted in memory of Alana Chen.
We need volunteers to be facilitators for synodal Conversations in the Spirit. Indicate your interest when you register. Synodal facilitators will need to go through online training and will be a part of a pre-call briefing.
Black Catholic News Resource
White supremacy still rules in the U.S.and in the Catholic Church, as our Black Catholic siblings know all too well. Let's keep working together to address and repair the grave denial of life and human dignity it causes, and not just on MLK Day or during Black Catholic History Month. If you don't already subscribe to The Black Catholic Messenger, it is an excellent online publication providing news, features, and essays not found anywhere else. Below is one of their recent articles.
Martin Luther King and the Black Social Gospel
by Daryl Grigsby January 16, 2025
Excerpt: "One of the oft-overlooked components of Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement is ironically one of the obvious features. That is, that he and struggle are firmly in the tradition of the Black Social Gospel. This tradition began in slavery, is evident in the spirituals, gave birth to Reconstruction, and has essentially been responsible for the mental health and physical survival of Black America for centuries..."
“Why am I still Catholic in light of the clergy abuse crisis, the Church’s teachings about and practices toward women and members of the LGTBQ+ community, the Church’s own complicity in and inadequate response to societal racism, and other scandals and issues?”
Author and commentator Daryl Grigsby set out to answer this question for himself by writing his newest book, Catholics for the Common Good: An Eternal Offering (Paulist Press, 2024). In it, he profiles 36 contemporary Catholics who have worked for justice and human dignity. He features Catholics from diverse national and racial backgrounds; religious, lay, and ordained.
Online presentation: February 12th at 7:00pm ET.
Follow-up group discussion on the text hosted by FutureChurch: February 26th at 7:00pm ET
Daryl Grigsby is an author and commentator on contemporary Catholic issues. A retired public works director, he also holds a Master’s Degree in Theology and Pastoral Studies from Seattle University and is a graduate of the Sabbatical Renewal Program at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University. He is a board member for Leadership Foundations, which resolves critical urban challenges around the world, and for FutureChurch. Grigsby is the author of In Their Footsteps: Inspirational Reflections on Black History for Every Day of the Year and is a frequent contributor to National Catholic Reporter and Black Catholic Messenger.
Pope Francis repeats calls for LGBTQ inclusion in new book
By Michael J. O’Loughlin / January 14, 2025
Outreach
Excerpt: "Reflecting on “Amoris Laetitia,” the 2016 apostolic exhortation on family life that opened the door to communion for Catholics living in irregular situations, including the divorced and remarried and people in same-sex relationships, Francis decried that “sexual sins tend to cause more of an outcry from some people.”
“But they are really not the most serious. They are human sins, of the flesh,” Francis wrote. “The most serious, on the contrary, are the sins that have more ‘angelicity,’ that dress themselves in another guise: pride, hatred, falsehood, fraud, abuse of power.”
He laments the seeming double-standards when it comes to blessings offered by the church.
“It is strange that nobody worries about the blessing of an entrepreneur who exploits people, and this is a grave sin, or about someone who pollutes our common home,” he writes, “while there’s a public scandal if the pope blesses a divorced woman or a homosexual.”
“Opposition to pastoral open-mindedness often uncovers these hypocrisies,” the pope added."
Full article
With Vatican Approval, Italian Bishops Change Criteria for Gay Seminarians
By Bernadette Donlon, January 11, 2025
Excerpt: "A new directive from the Italian Bishops Conference will allow gay seminary candidates to be assessed in the same way that heterosexual candidates, clearing up two decades worth of confusion caused by ambiguous Vatican statements about gay men and the priesthood. This directive was approved by the Vatican."