On the Italian coast, about an hour’s drive from the hospital where Pope Francis is recovering from pneumonia, an unexpected group of Catholics is praying for his health. These sex workers from Latin America, many of whom are poor and transgender, view the 88-year-old pontiff as their saviour. They consider him an open-minded soul who not only invited them to the Vatican but also 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.
Living on Rome’s desolate outskirts, Torres and other South and Central American women relied on nighttime solicitations for survival. When the 2020 lockdown halted their work, they sought refuge at a Torvaianica church, joining countless others. This crisis led to an intervention by the head of the Catholic Church.
– Papal aid and audience –
According to parish priest Andrea Conocchia, the first transgender woman to arrive at the Beata Vergine Immacolata church was an Argentine woman named Paola. 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.'”
“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 living illegally in Italy.
Today, around 60 women continue to receive monetary help from the pope, the priest said.
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.
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.
Pope Francis’s health 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.
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