Praying with LGBTQ Catholics: An immersive liturgical experience
A reflection by CSPL Intern, Alex Gruber, on their experience as a panelist at the June 2026 Outreach Conference.
Fr. Chris Lawton, CSP, Kate Williams, Gillian Ebersole, Chris de Silva and Alex Gruber
I have had the blessing of attending each of the four in-person conferences for Outreach, the LGBTQ Catholic ministry supported by the Jesuits’ America Media. This year’s gathering was the first at which I served as a panelist. For “Praying with LGBTQ Catholics: An immersive liturgical experience,” I joined liturgical musician and Vice President of Sacred Music at GIA Publications Kate Williams, Associate Pastor at St. Paul the Apostle Church in New York City Fr. Chris Lawton, CSP, MFA in Dance student at the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign Gillian Ebersole, and liturgical composer and Associate Director of Campus Ministry at Loyola Marymount University Chris de Silva. Together, we spoke about our experiences of fashioning and participating in welcoming and affirming liturgies for LGBTQIA+ Catholics within and outside of literal and figurative church walls, from the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Beloved liturgy to Out at St. Paul’s Pride Mass at the Stonewall National Monument to the ecumenical Imago Dei celebration held in parks across Green Bay, Wisconsin. Importantly, we dedicated half of our time to modeling such an inclusive liturgy so that people could experience the transformative effects of ritual in song, Scripture, poetry, movement, and material reality.
Outreach began as a virtual conference in the summer of 2021 and moved to in-person gatherings at Fordham University in New York City, then to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where this year over 450 LGBTQIA+ Catholics met. This group, the largest number for Outreach yet, witnessed powerfully to God’s expansive love through our voices joined in prayer, raised in song, and spoken in panels on queer theology, parish ministries, and transgender experiences. One such panel on LGBTQ women in the Church stirred the hearts and souls of everyone in the room, such that we easily got to our feet and joined the chorus of “Closer to Fine” when it was offered as our closing prayer.
Amid all these moments of grace, those of shared ritual gave me the clearest and most humbling glimpses of God. Outreach and its gatherings have been prayerful since their start, but this year’s conference featured especially profound liturgies from its opening evening prayer to its closing ceremony of commissioning. Cardinal Robert McElroy began and ended Mass with his thanks to us for the privilege of celebrating the Eucharist in our presence, bringing many, including me, to tears. More tears were shed during the inspired and inspiring preaching of LGBTQIA+ Catholics in our other liturgies. They convicted and empowered us to cooperate with each other and God’s grace to transform the Church and the world to be more welcoming and just so that all God’s people and creation may flourish.
Having attended previous Outreach conferences, I saw many old friends this year and rejoiced in the chance to hear how God was present in their lives. I also had the blessing of seeing many new faces this year and getting to know a few of them. Simply being with other LBTQIA+ Catholics and allies is an incalculable gift, because it reminds us that we are never alone. All of us are made in love, beloved, and called to love justly and humbly by God, and I thank God for the powerful reminder of this fundamental truth through the 2026 Outreach conference.
If you would like to read through the model liturgy from the panel and the additional resources we compiled for inclusive liturgies, you are welcome to access them in this folder.
