Freedom Within Religion: The Participation of LGBT+ Catholics in the Jubilee 2025

In 2000, during the Great Jubilee, the Catholic Church opposed the celebration of the International Gay Pride in Rome. Twenty-five years later, in 2025, the LGBT+ Jubilee pilgrimage was included in the official Jubilee program. This article analyzes both the narratives of those who participated in the pilgrimage and the sociohistorical factors that made this event possible. Using digital content analysis of 50 testimonies collected by La Tenda di Gionata, the Catholic LGBT+ organization responsible for organizing the LGBT+ Jubilee pilgrimage, the study shows that the principle of dignity emerges as the main narrative legitimizing the belonging of LGBT+ Catholics within the Church, expressed through recurrent claims for recognition rather than through mere welcoming. Furthermore, the article identifies two endogenous factors that contributed to the conditions under which this event took place: the pragmatic strategy of Pope Francis’s pontificate and the alignment and convergence of the Catholic LGBT+ movement with the wider culture of rights. The study suggests that these developments were made possible by the unexpected consequences of religious freedom within the religious field, which enabled a major shift in the understanding of religion, from a duty-centered to right-centered framework, in the contemporary world.