Transgender sex workers welcomed by Pope pray for his health

On the Italian coast about an hour’s drive from the hospital where Pope Francis is recovering from pneumonia, an unlikely group of Catholics are praying for his health.

Poor and transgender, these sex workers from Latin America consider the 88-year-old pontiff their saviour, an open-minded soul who not only invited them to the Vatican, but sent them money for food and rent.

“Pope Francis opened the doors. I never thought I’d be with him in the Vatican, talking with him… Being accepted into the Church is a treasure for me,” Andrea Paola Torres, a 54-year-old Colombian transgender woman known as Consuelo, told AFP.

Torres is one of a group from Peru, Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere in South and Central America, living on the grim outskirts of Rome and waiting for clients along a coastal highway at night to get by.

An intervention by the head of the world’s Catholics came during the coronavirus lockdown in 2020, when work came to a halt and the women went to the local church in Torvaianica for help — joining dozens of other desperate people with no livelihoods.

– Papal aid and audience –

The first transgender woman to arrive at the Beata Vergine Immacolata church was an Argentine woman named Paola, said parish priest Andrea Conocchia. Many others followed.

Conocchia recalls recommending that the sex workers write to the pope — the first pontiff from the Americas — telling their stories and asking for help.

“They told me: ‘Don Andrea, we can’t write to the pope… the pope would be scandalised if he read what we’ve done.’”

But it worked.

“Pope Francis sent us money so we would have enough to buy meat or pay the rent,” recalled Claudia Victoria Salas, a 58-year-old Argentine who was able to stop and now works as a bar cleaner.

But the pontiff from Buenos Aires went further: he arranged anti-Covid vaccines, and even paid for the body of a woman found dead last year to be sent back home to Peru.

Perhaps more meaningfully, the pope invited the women to meet him. Both Salas and Torres proudly display within their homes photos of themselves meeting Francis at a public audience at the Vatican.

During the pandemic, the church helped about 150 transgender women in various ways, many of them working as prostitutes and living illegally in Italy.

Today, around 60 women continue to receive monetary help from the pope, the priest said.

– ‘Pastoral revolution’ –

It was on a flight back from Brazil in the first year of his papacy that Francis famously said: “Who am I to judge?”, thus opening the doors of the Church to the LGBTQ community.

Francis has also championed the rights of the poor, the vulnerable and particularly migrants — a description that fits many of the women in this community in Torvaianica, many of whom are HIV-positive.

Torres said she left Colombia “because of poverty and police abuse” while Salas fled Argentina after her family rejected her.

Another woman, Debora Tomaz, 38, left Rio de Janeiro for fear her ex-partner would kill her, “as happens to so many women” in Brazil, she told AFP.

Francis has repeatedly stated that the Church has “room for everyone” and the Vatican in 2023 said transgender people could be baptised, be godparents or witnesses at baptisms and weddings.

It said last year, however, that sex reassignment surgery threatens the “unique dignity” of the person.

None of the women AFP spoke to underwent such sex reassignment surgery.

Conocchia, the priest, said he hopes Francis’s “pastoral revolution” of welcoming transgender people will gradually loosen Church doctrine.

– ‘We love God’ –

Francis’s condition is improving, according to updates from the Vatican, but his month-long hospitalisation has set off alarm bells among this community, who fear a reversal of the Church’s position were the first Latin American pope to die.

“I don’t know if when another pope comes, he will be just like him. That’s the fear,” adds Tomaz, who left prostitution and is now studying to earn a high school diploma.

Torres, who began working the streets as a “little man” at age 12 back in Colombia and continues to do so “to survive,” is also concerned, but remains hopeful.

“Homosexuality will continue. I will die, and another will emerge. That one will die, and another will emerge. The pope opened the doors of the Church to show that we have an identity,” she said.

“We are like this, but we love God,” she said.

Her run-down, two-room house, sandwiched between the beach and coastal road, reflects her faith.

In a corner sits a figure of baby Jesus, whom she bathes and dresses in clothes that she sews herself.

“When I’m alone here, I remember so much suffering, but I cling to Jesus, to my God,” she said. “I am Catholic and I have always clung to him.”

AFP