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Pope Francis, November 24, 2019 in Nagasaki, Japan. Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

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TORVAIANICA, Italy, April 30, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis has allegedly provided “immediate” financial help to a group of transsexuals who were no longer able to support themselves from “customers on the street” amid the coronavirus lockdown in Italy. 

“At the height of the coronavirus emergency, a group of transsexuals, almost all Latin Americans, arrived in the church with amazement and wonder,” Don Andrea Conocchia, the parish priest of Torvaianica, not far from Rome, told Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano.

“They asked for help because with the virus they no longer had customers on the street,” Don Andrea continued. 

According to Il Fatto Quotidiano, the priest “was not overcome by prejudices, but was immediately won over by the solidarity of this transsexual community that shared the rent and helped as much as it could.”

The group of transsexual prostitutes reached out to Pope Francis, through the Papal Almoner, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski. 

“Francis’ response was immediate,” the paper reported.

The Papal Almoner is responsible for charitable works done in the name of the Holy Father.

Krajewski “immediately brought personally all the necessary help” to Torvaianica.

Krajewski told Corriere della Sera that the transsexuals “earned money off the books, obviously, perhaps they have problems with documents and cannot apply for subsidies.” He said that other parishes have also reported similar problems of trying to look after the needs of “prostitutes” who no longer have anything to eat. 

Cardinal Krajewski caused some controversy in 2019 after breaking the law to reconnect electricity to a building occupied by squatters, where the electricity had been cut off due to outstanding electric bills of roughly 300,000 euros. On the one hand, the building was known to house numerous families with young children. On the other, it was also known to host rave parties. One of the groups which hosted the raves, LaRoboterie, described itself as, “techno, queer, gay, lesbian and transsexual.” Krajewski climbed down a manhole and broke a seal to reconnect electrical circuit breakers for the building. He defended the act as a “humanitarian gesture” aimed at protecting the families living there.

The transsexuals expressed their gratitude to Pope Francis by recording an audio message: “Many thanks to Pope Francis! May God bless you, thank you for everything! A thousand blessings! May the Virgin protect you!”

LifeSiteNews reached out to Don Andrea and to the Vatican Press Office for comment. No response was provided by press time. 

Pope Francis has previously affirmed people claiming to be a member of the opposite sex, commonly known as transgender or transsexual.

In 2016, during an in-flight press conference on his way back to Rome from a trip to Georgia and Azerbaijan, the Holy Father recounted how he had once received a letter “from a Spanish man who told me his story from the time when he was a child. He was born a female, a girl, and he suffered greatly because he felt that he was a boy but physically was a girl.”

Throughout the interview, Francis referred to the person as a “man,” even though she necessarily continued to be a biological woman. “He, who had been she, but is he,” the Pope emphasized.

“He told his mother, when he was in his twenties, at 22, that he wanted to have an operation and so forth. His mother asked him not to do so as long as she was alive. She was elderly, and died soon after. He had the operation,” the Pope said.

The woman was helped by the local bishop, characterized by the Pope as “a good bishop” who “‘wasted’ time to accompany this man.”

The person “changed his civil identity, he got married and he wrote me a letter saying that it would bring comfort to him to come see and me with his bride … I received them. They were pleased.”

It was in January of 2015 that the Pope granted an audience to the two women whom the world’s press dubbing a “transsexual man and his fiancée.”

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Francis welcomed the two into his private suite at Domus Santa Marta to a “strictly private meeting,” reported Spanish language paper Hoy. The paper speculated that the meeting was a signal that “Pope Francis may also change the reality of [Catholic] people who have decided or decide, as did Diego [one of the women], to reassign their gender.”

Catholic teaching considers gender “reassignment” an impossibility and a violation of the Creator’s intention. 

Cardinal Raymond Burke and Bishop Athanasius Schneider, together with several other bishops, wrote in their 2019 Declaration of Truths that gender reassignment surgery is a “grave sin” and a “rebellion” against divine and natural law. 

“The male and female sexes, man and woman, are biological realities created by the wise will of God (see Gen. 1: 27; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 369). It is, therefore, a rebellion against natural and Divine law and a grave sin that a man may attempt to become a woman by mutilating himself, or even by simply declaring himself to be such, or that a woman may in like manner attempt to become a man, or to hold that the civil authority has the duty or the right to act as if such things were or may be possible and legitimate (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2297),” they wrote.