The pope is visited by transgender people at his general audiences. He has gone to a permanent carnival park to visit the Little Sisters of Jesus who bring these trans people to him. And he chats with some of his trans visitors by email. However improbable it may seem, this is something that has happened and been happening.

Of course, you may very well have heard of part of this story, but there’s a good chance you weren’t aware of the connection to the spiritual family of Saint Charles de Foucauld. And if you knew of the connection, you almost certainly didn’t know the wild story of how it all came about. The background hasn’t been properly researched and presented in the press and the media. To make up for the deficiencies, this post relates as much of the full and inside story as I have been able to put together. It’s an unusual foray into journalism for this blog, but the story is relevant, and nobody else has told it the way it deserves to be told.

The story in the media thus far

About a year ago, it became known that Pope Francis had been welcoming trans people at the Wednesday General Audiences. The first four such meetings were the audiences of April 27, June 22, August 3, and August 10, 2022, according to L’Osservatore Romano.[1] There was quite a lot of news reporting on this at the time. Most of the news reports that I saw mentioned the connection to a “Sister Geneviève Jeanningros,” but although a few of those news reports did clarify that she was one of the “Little Sisters” (never explicitly stated, as far as I know, as Little Sisters of Jesus), most did not. It could be that part of the reason for this silence was to avoid too much of a fallout that such a small order and community could never be able to cope with. There is always a risk of turning into a focal point for opposition, sadly, and nobody would wish that on these Sisters!

At any rate, in a conversation with Jesuits in Portugal that was recently published in La Civiltà Cattolica, Pope Francis gave quite a few details on how these trans people came to be visiting him. He confirmed publicly that the connection was via “a Charles de Foucauld sister”:

I take a cue from your question and want to add something else that concerns transgender people. The Wednesday general audiences are attended by a Charles de Foucauld sister, Sister Geneviève, who is in her eighties and is a chaplain at the Circus in Rome with two other sisters. They live in a mobile home next to the Circus. One day I went to visit them. They have a little chapel, a kitchen, sleeping area, everything well organized. And that nun also works a lot with people who are transgender. One day she said, “Can I bring them to the audience?” “Sure!” I answered her, “why not?” And groups of trans [people] come all the time. The first time they came, they were crying. I was asking them why. One of them told me, “I didn’t think the pope would receive me!” Then, after the first surprise, they made a habit of coming. Some write to me, and I email them back. Everyone is invited! I realized that these people feel rejected, and it is really hard.[2]

There are many details in this story as told by the pope. First, he has contact with some Little Sisters of Jesus. Second, these three Little Sisters have contact with trans people at a fixed-location carnival or amusement park (the translation as “circus” is not quite right here) near Rome, where they live in a caravan or mobile home. Third, there was a conversation between the pope and one of the sisters before any trans people were brought along to the Wednesday audiences. Fourth, these meetings became a habit, as we already know from last year’s news reports. Finally, the pope has stayed in contact with some of the trans people he has met in Rome—via email. How twenty-first century!

There are two dimensions here, which I think are worth pausing on. We have two little streams that merge into one river. The first is Pope Francis’ experience and contact with trans people; it has a history. The second is how the Little Sisters and the spirituality of Charles de Foucauld fit into this story. Both aspects to this long-term narrative have been ignored in the reporting that I’ve seen. It is useful to flesh this background out.

Background of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and ministry to trans people in Argentina

Austen Ivereigh, in the second volume of his biographical books on Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Pope Francis, has recounted events that give a much longer story. Already in Argentina, the future pope had contacts:

As cardinal, Bergoglio was familiar with the plight of gender dysphoria and trans people from a Discalced Carmelite sister in Argentina whom he had known since 1985. He regularly called and visited Sister Monica Astorga to give his support for her groundbreaking ministry to trans women, many of whom, shunned by society, turned to prostitution. When he visited her in Neuquén in 2009, he told her, “Don’t leave them alone. This is the frontier work that the Lord has given you.” From Rome, Francis has continued to encourage Sister Monica, likening trans people in letters to her to the lepers of Jesus’s time.[3]

It seems that when he was cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires, the future pope’s contact was more with the sister, who was interestingly a Carmelite nun and not a member of some more active Order. There is no mention of direct contact with trans people themselves, although the former cardinal archbishop was unmistakably clear about his support for the ministry, both when he was in Argentina and after he became Bishop of Rome. To liken someone to a leper in the Gospel story says a lot about what Jesus would do for such people, what kind of ministry of presence and close contact he would engage in, and how he would break or bend social rules to make that happen.

Background of Pope Francis in contact with trans people in Rome

The story does not end here. Once he became pope, a trans person came to visit Francis. Austen Ivereigh continues:

So when Diego Neria Lejárraga wrote to Francis at the end of 2014, Francis had a good sense of the pain the Spaniard wanted to share. Neria had grown up a girl in the Spanish city of Plasencia but waited until his mother died before having reassignment surgery at the age of forty. Eight years later, he was a practicing Catholic who had been insulted and spurned by a tiny minority in his parish who found his presence intolerable. When he received Neria’s letter, Francis invited him to the Vatican in January 2015, together with his fiancée, the first time—at least on public record—that a pope had received a trans person. Francis hugged him and told him he was “a son of the Church.” If someone in the parish tried to shun him, he told him, the problem was theirs, not his.[4]

These events significantly predate the General Audiences of last year, and they are part of an ongoing story, which has often been treated not as a running thread, or a tapestry, but rather as some novelty or abrupt discontinuity.

An enduring connection with the Little Sisters of Jesus at the carnival

Also converging in this story is the presence of Sister Geneviève and the Little Sisters. This dimension, too, has a history.

The Little Sisters of Jesus have had a long-standing presence among circuses, amusement parks, funfairs, and carnivals, both travelling and stationary, in Europe and also elsewhere. Already in 2016, Pope Francis paid a surprise visit to one such group of Sisters at an amusement park or fixed-location carnival in Ostia, just outside Rome.[5] This is the group which has connections to our main story about trans people. And the particular amusement park to which they belong is one that the Little Sisters have been committed to for over a half-century. Its original location was in, not outside, Rome, nearby the “mother” or “family” home of the Little Sisters at Tre Fontane.

As Luna Park developed and more funfair rides were added, proximity to their main house in Rome led some Little Sisters to seize an opportunity. In 1966, they opened a little stall within the park, operating one of those carnival “fishing” games where you can win prizes. In this case, the results of one’s labour—and chance—would be religious items related to the Nativity and Child Jesus, made by the Sisters. Thus, a small amount of Christian and year-round Christmas joy was embedded in a place that might otherwise be, from some viewpoints, abandoned. Children were and are of course the main customers, clients, or audience of the stall itself. This wasn’t proselytizing, just presence. It was a light in the night, as the name of the stall had it.[6]

Years later, the entire entertainment venue had to move to Ostia. At that time, the Little Sisters did not give up on this community. A few of them moved with their itinerant friends. In fact, they moved closer, because at the earlier Rome site they had not lived as closely among them (it being within earshot of Tre Fontane, at which they could be based). Nowadays, three Little Sisters live in a caravan and continue to run a small stand, as workers among other workers. Their stand still has a “fishing game,” but nowadays it’s “Noah’s ark.”

Pope Francis did not just happen to visit this place by chance. As is often the case, he knew someone. There was a personal connection. Although the press and the media did not notice this at the time, of the three Little Sisters at Ostia, it was actually Sister Geneviève who was known to him—the same Sister who would later ask if trans friends could come along to the Wednesday audience.

Bergoglio and Sister Geneviève had met, I am told by a Little Sister whom I know, in Argentina. The latter had a family member, herself a Catholic Sister, who was killed by the military during the Dirty War (1974–1983). When she went to Argentina to honour her relative’s memory, the first encounter took place. This was probably a significant meeting for Bergoglio, because when he was a Jesuit superior, he had actually saved the lives of many people sought by the government, getting them new papers, chauffeuring them himself, hiding them “on retreat” in the seminary, and transferring them to nearby countries.[7] That a Little Sister of Jesus—a disciple of Charles de Foucauld, who was such an important figure in Bergoglio’s spiritual development—had a relative who had suffered a final fate during the Dirty War, who was herself a Sister, and that this Little Sister had made a pilgrimage to honour her body: this, I cannot imagine, would have been easy to forget!

Following his 2013 “change of diocese” (as he has often put it), the two who had met in Argentina were now based in the same urban area in Italy. Accordingly, Francis paid Geneviève and her community a visit. When he came to visit the Little Sisters, the pope made his way past the gate and entered their (quite rooted) mobile home. In the dwelling of a group of Little Sisters of Jesus, there is usually a chapel, and in the chapel, a simple tabernacle with the Blessed Sacrament reserved. Pope Francis visited the chapel in the caravan—as well, of course, as his friend and her fellow Sisters, and the community.

The Holy Father went on pilgrimage to a chapel in a mobile home at a residential area for amusement park workers. This atypical religious dimension encapsulates the relationship between Pope Francis and the Ostia community, both of Little Sisters and their friends. If we can penetrate it and really understand it, we can see why the pope came to be visited at the Vatican by these trans people in particular.

In an article in Aleteia, Sister Amelia of the Ostia community speaks of the faith life of their neighbours—which has great marks of the “popular piety” that is so dear to Pope Francis even when it is unconnected to the more formal life of the Church (cf. Evangelii Gaudium 69–70, 122–126):

They like to make pilgrimages, the idea of the journey. We have made many over the years: we pray, we attend Mass and we eat together… Although they are not often practicing, they have a deep religious sense. In this kind of life, in contact with people and nature, the unexpected is always around the corner. It leads you to have fewer attachments and to entrust yourself to God.[8]

Interpreting these remarks needs care. Aleteia describes it as: “The Sisters also organize community events.” But as with Pope Francis in casual conversation, or La Civiltà Cattolica in translation, calling Geneviève a “chaplain,” this is almost certainly an oversimplification for those less familiar with the Little Sisters.

“But what do you do?” is a common question the Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus hear, even after they have already explained what they do. It is sometimes hard for others to accept that what they do is contemplation and friendship. The reason these Sisters themselves are at that carnival is not necessarily an active ministry of doing something to their neighbours or for them. It originates more in a sense of living with them. As Sister Amelia also recalls:

Our people were truly affected by his [Francis’] visit. It is the first time the pope has entered a caravan, he entered into one of their caravans; he entered into their world. This is what has remained with them. They felt he was close to them, one of them.[9]

The words that Sister Amelia chooses reflect her own priorities, way of life, and spirituality. She mentions presence, entering, closeness, and belonging. What matters first is being together, friendship, fraternity, and life together, not organization and plans.

The Little Sisters of course follow the spirituality of Charles de Foucauld, especially as interpreted through the foundations of Little Sister Magdeleine of Jesus. Although they started in the Sahara in the 1930s, after the Second World War, the Little Sisters moved into the world of workers, factories, travellers, and itinerants to live with them and exercise a ministry primarily of loving presence, much like Charles de Foucauld living with the Tuareg at Tamanrasset.

Amongst the sick, they shared the poverty of dependence. Amongst the prisoners, prostitutes, homosexuals, transexuals, those caught up in the ‘moral marginalisation’ often inextricably bound up with other forms of poverty, in cities ranging from Bern to Amsterdam to Tokyo, they were there to recognise that the weakness that pervaded the lives of the morally vulnerable was also inherent in their own; and the closer they came to the people whose lives they shared the more they realised also that in lives that were often full of violence, the deliberate attempt to change them would be just one more violation of something very precious to humanity: individual freedom… In tiny fraternities in slum dwellings, caravans and tents the Blessed Sacrament and the prayer of the Little Sisters radiated the presence of Jesus.[10]

Today, the Sisters live a contemplative life in the cities, on the roads, and in the workforce, particularly among the excluded, and bring Jesus into unlikely places via an apostolate of friendship—and as they bring him there, they find him there.

When the pope did just the same thing, even if for a brief moment, the Little Sisters and their friends and neighbours in the carnival community were deeply affected by what had happened. Subsequently, the Aleteia article tells us, the path he walked was renamed for him. In that sense, the pope never left them, even though he had to return to his own “job.”

The streams converge

The news reporting that we saw last year—and which has come back into the spotlight with the pope’s most recent published conversation in La Civiltà Cattolica—is just a convergence of these streams. Certainly, in bringing everything together, we get a rather larger, more noticeable, noisier river. But the simple waters are the same.

The Little Sisters were with these trans people, members of the carnival community and workforce. Pope Francis had familiarity with the importance of an apostolate that included trans people in Argentina. And he had himself known one of these Little Sisters from his days in Buenos Aires and had earlier visited them at their carnival-worker caravan in Ostia, just outside Rome. He went on pilgrimage to them, and some trans members of the community, with their religious piety for pilgrimages, engage in the same style of “culture of encounter” in the other direction.

There is nothing discontinuous in the 2022 General Audiences (and the 2023 publication of a conversation with Jesuits in Portugal). We are just seeing the product of many years of events coming together at a transcontinental scale. The press and the media saw only the recent, local surface of the story. One thing they missed, and which is so often missed about this pope, is the long-term connection to the spiritual family of Saint Charles de Foucauld.

In welcoming these trans people who may have felt excluded, Pope Francis is bringing another aspect of Charles de Foucauld’s spirituality into the Vatican. He may not be able to always live with them, like the Little Sisters he knows. But he shares his world with them when they do come on those pilgrimages so dear to their popular piety, and in the in-between times, he shares exchanges with them—via the world of email.

[1] Nicole Winfield, “Pope Francis meets transgender guests of Rome church,” Crux (August 11, 2022), which can be read here.

[2] Antonio Spadaro, “‘The Water Has Been Agitated’: Francis in conversation with Jesuits in Portugal,” La Civiltà Cattolica (August 28, 2023), which can be read here. Although this is technically an extract from a private conversation with some Jesuits on an apostolic trip for World Youth Day, Antonio Spadaro has elsewhere noted that the pope himself cuts out whatever he thinks should be removed, either because of meaning or form.

[3] Austen Ivereigh, Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and his Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (New York: Henry Holt, 2019), 293–294.

[4] Ibid., 294.

[5] Marinella Bandini, “Live at the amusement park? These Little Sisters do,” Aleteia (August 20, 2016), which can be read here.

[6] Details on this venture can be found in Kathryn Spink, The Call of the Desert: A Biography of Little Sister Magdeleine of Jesus (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1993), 207–208. I was able to identify Luna Park, near Tre Fontane, with the original location thanks to comments from a Little Sister, thus linking this biography of the founder of the Little Sisters of Jesus to the recent news stories.

[7] This sad chapter in the history of Argentina and in Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s life story is related in Austen Ivereigh, The Great Reformer: Pope Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 131–164.

[8] Bandini, “Live at the amusement park?” art. cit.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Spink, The Call of the Desert, 256–257.