On the Italian coast, on the hospital on an hour -long drive where the Pope Francis is recovering from pneumonia, an unexpected group of Catholics is praying for their health. Latin America sex workers, many of whom are poor and transgender, sees 88 -year -old Pontiff as their savior. They consider him an open -minded soul, which not only invited him to the Vatican, but also sent them money for food and rent.
“Pope Francis opened the doors. I never thought that I would be with her in the Vatican, talking with her … Accepting in the church is a treasure for me,” Andrea Paola Torres, a 54 -year -old Colombian transgender woman, known as Consuelo, told AFP.
Living in desolate outskins of Rome, Torres and other south and central American women rely on the night time for survival. When the 2020 lockdown stopped his work, he sought refuge in a Torvianika Church, which joined countless others. The crisis intervened by the head of the Catholic Church.
– Pope aid and viewer –
According to Parish priest Andrea Connoocheya, the first transgender woman to arrive at the beta vegin Imacolta Church was an Argentina woman named Paola. Many others chased.
Conocchia recalls that sex workers write to the Pope – the first Pontiff from America – to narrate his stories and ask for help.
“He told me: ‘Don Andrea, we cannot write to the Pope … Pope will be scammed if he read what we have done.”
“Pope Francis sent us money so that we would have enough to buy meat or pay rent,” 58 -year -old Argentina Claudia recalled Victoria Salas, who was able to stop and now works as a bar cleaner.
But Pontif proceeded from Buenos Aires: she arranged for covid anti-covid vaccines, and even paid for the body of a woman to be sent back home in Peru last year.
Perhaps more meaningfully, the Pope invited women to meet them. Both Salas and Torres proudly display pictures of their homes to meet Francis on a public audience in the Vatican inside their homes.
During the epidemic, the church helped around 150 transgender women in various ways, many of them living illegally in Italy.
Today, about 60 women continue to receive monetary assistance from the Pope, the priest said.
Francis has also made the rights of the poor, weak and especially migrants champion-a details that fit many women in this community in the Torvianika, many of which are HIV positive.
Francis repeatedly stated that the church has a “room for all” and in 2023 Vatican said that transgender people could be baptized, baptism and witnesses in baptisms and weddings.
According to the Vatican update, the health of Pope Francis is improving, but their monthly hospitalization has created alarm bells among the community, which feared the reversal of the church status that the first Latin American Pope to die was the first Latin American Pope.
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