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Here's yet another of those pope-private-meetings stories (this one from January)
After undergoing a sex change operation in 2007, Diego Neria Lejárraga, a lifelong Catholic, stopped attending mass because he felt shunned by his fellow parishioners. "I felt left out. I felt rejected by the church. I felt I was unjustly perceived as something wrong," Neria, a 48-year-old transgender man from Plasencia, Spain, explains ...... “After hearing him on many occasions, I felt that he would listen to me” ...
... Lejarraga wrote to the pope last year, saying he had been "marginalized" by church officials in the city of Plasencia in the Estremadura region. A practicing Catholic, he said local clergy had rebuffed him and said one parish priest had called him "the devil's daughter" ...
... his local bishop helped get the letter noticed. Next, according to Neria, came two phone calls from Francis ...
... Neria answered a phone call from an anonymous number on Dec. 8, 2014 – the voice on the other end of the line said, "I am Pope Francis" ... Neria says the pope, who is well-known for his heartfelt cold calls to letter writers, told him he was moved by his story. "We talked for 15 minutes or so and before he hung up, the Holy Father told me that he would ring again to fix a date for a meeting" ...
... a few days before Christmas, Francis himself (not an assistant) called again and set the date: January 24, 2015 at Santa Marta, the dorm-style Vatican guesthouse for visiting priests and lay people ...
... Lejarraga reportedly attended the meeting with his fiancée. During the meeting, Lejarraga asked Francis if, after his gender reassignment, there was "a place somewhere in the house of God for him" ... Hoy Francis responded by embracing him ...
... "This man loves the whole world," Neria says of Pope Francis ...
... Vatican spokesmen and the local Spanish bishop's office declined to comment on the meeting, insisting the Pope's private meetings are just that ...
... Francis last November demoted an American cardinal who is an outspoken critic of marriage rights for same-sex couples and abortion ... Francis in 2010 described Argentina’s same-sex marriage bill as “the work of the devil” before President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner signed it into law ...
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