Cardinal Robert W McElroy, Archbishop of Washington, celebrated Mass for around 500 participants at the Outreach 2026 conference for LGBT Catholics at Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall on June 20, 2026.

In his homily, the cardinal said that the Church had often wounded the LGBT community through judgmentalism and exclusion, while highlighting developments under Pope Leo XIV as offering new hope for pastoral practice.

Outreach, founded in 2022 by the Jesuit Fr James Martin SJ, describes itself as a ministry that “celebrates and elevates the gifts of LGBTQ Catholics” and supports families and allies. The annual conference, now in its fifth year, gathered lay people, clergy, theologians and families under the theme “Walking Side by Side”. Outreach said the conference was held at Georgetown University from June 19 to June 21, 2026, and gathered “LGBTQ lay people, clergy, scholars, artists, educators, students and family members”.

Fr Martin promoted the event on X, posting a photograph of the crowded hall and noting that Cardinal McElroy’s homily “moved many to tears”.

Cardinal McElroy, appointed to Washington by Pope Francis in early 2025, has long advocated expansive pastoral accompaniment. A former Bishop of San Diego with advanced degrees in moral theology, he delivered the homily, the full text of which was published by Outreach. He began by drawing on Cardinal Walter Kasper’s theology of mercy and St Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

He said: “Mercy is God’s first word to us. Mercy is God’s great gift to us. Mercy is the ambient culture of the Church which sees both the sinfulness of the human person and the striving for redemption and holiness that constitute the seeds of grace planted in fertile soil in our hearts and souls…”

Cardinal McElroy continued: “As we gather for this conference in a Church which has so frequently wounded the LGBT community through judgmentalism and exclusion, we should find great hope in two important developments that have taken place during the pontificate of Pope Leo which constitute rich seeds for the unfolding of the Gospel in the years to come.”

The cardinal cited Pope Leo XIV’s comments during his recent trip to Africa: “The unity or division in the Church should not revolve around sexual matters.”

He continued: “This simple declaration puts in context the call to chastity as a component of the Christian moral life. Too often both in magisterial statements and on the popular level, sexual sins have been condemned with an ardour that effectively places them in the eyes of many believers as the core moral obligation of Christians. This is utterly false to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

He added: “When Pope Leo points to the comparative importance of economic justice, war and peace, immigration and racism as key elements of the Christian moral life, he is rejecting this false reductionism that concentrates moral obligations within the sexual realm.”

Pope Leo made the remarks on the papal plane on April 23, saying that Church unity “should not revolve around sexual matters” while also saying that the Holy See did not approve formalised blessings of same-sex unions.

The second development referenced by Cardinal McElroy was the report of Synod Study Group 9 from the 2024 Synod on Synodality. The cardinal quoted the group’s emphasis on a “new paradigm based upon the kerygma” and its focus on “lived experience”: “The Church’s mission is not a matter of abstractly proclaiming and deductively applying principles that are set out in an immutable and rigid manner, but of fostering a living encounter with the person of the risen Lord Jesus by engaging with the lived experience of faith of the people of God…”

He stressed: “Pastoral practice … proceeds from the conviction that the concrete situations in which people find themselves are constitutive dimensions of how doctrine should be formed in the light of the kerygma.”

Describing Pope Francis’s legacy, he said: “I believe that this is the greatest contribution that Pope Francis made to the life of the Church – the call to reform our conception of pastoral theology… Pastoral practice is not the understanding of how to apply an already formed and often reified set of principles to concrete situations.”

For many lay Catholics, the message is straightforward: the Church’s historic teaching on chastity and the nature of marriage is being presented as secondary or overly emphasised, while personal experience and concrete situations are said to shape how doctrine is understood and applied.

Traditional Catholics have expressed concern that this risks relativising objective moral norms contained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 2357-2359, which describes homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered” while calling for respect, compassion and sensitivity towards persons with same-sex attraction.

The Archdiocese of Washington has not issued further public comment beyond noting the archbishop’s pastoral schedule. Critics on X and in conservative Catholic circles described the event as emblematic of a broader pattern in which progressive initiatives receive prominent episcopal support while groups attached to the Traditional Latin Mass continue to face local restrictions and apostolic visitations, despite record pilgrimages such as Chartres.

The episode underscores ongoing tensions in the Church over the proper balance between mercy and truth, accompaniment and conversion, and the unchanging deposit of faith. Cardinal McElroy’s homily, delivered at one of America’s most historic Jesuit universities, is likely to fuel debate among bishops, priests and laity about the direction of pastoral care in the synodal era under Pope Leo XIV.