Pope Leo XIV met with members of Courage International on Feb. 6 in what the ministry called a “historic” and “momentous” event that took place in Vatican City.
The Connecticut-based ministry, which for nearly half a century has ministered to Catholics dealing with same-sex attraction, said in a press statement that leaders associated with the group, including Bridgeport Bishop Frank Caggiano and group Executive Director Father Brian Gannon, met with the Holy Father in a private audience.
“The opportunity to share with the Holy Father the works of the apostolate, to provide pastoral accompaniment to persons who experience same-sex attraction but who strive to live chaste lives or to accompany family members who have a loved one who identifies as LGBTQ, was a momentous occasion,” the group said.
Officially founded in 1980, Courage International marked 45 years in 2025 of helping individuals struggling with sexuality to “live a chaste life” in line with Church teaching. Originally founded in Manhattan, the group’s headquarters is based in Bridgeport.
Pope Leo “is very, very supportive of everything that Courage is doing.”
Father Brian GannonExecutive Director, Courage International
Gannon, who came into the leadership role at the organization in 2024, told EWTN News on Feb. 6 that the meeting — the group’s first with a pope — was an “extraordinary gift” from the Holy Father.
“The pope was very gracious, a very good listener,” he said. “We talked about the importance of chastity, how it heals and strengthens and restores the person. The pope was obviously very encouraging.”
The Holy Father in turn “talked about freedom, about what real freedom is —not the unbridled freedom that the world offers, but rather mastering our passions and being in complete surrender to the will of God.”
Gannon said the meeting with Leo constitutes a “huge morale booster” for the group, which has chapters in over a dozen countries and numbers more than 200 chaplains, including through its family support ministry, EnCourage.
“All the members of Courage throughout the whole world will see that the pope extended an audience and listened and is very, very supportive of everything that Courage is doing,” Gannon said, calling the encounter “a huge blessing.”
The priest told EWTN News last year that the organization is a “needed ministry” that “helps people find peace.”
Group members “come together, read through the goals, discuss their experiences and challenges during the week, and pray,” he said. “Prayer is absolutely central to it.”
On Feb. 6, Gannon said, the pope spoke to the group about “the woundedness of people,” and how “Jesus Christ is always with you and you’re never alone.”
Gannon described the group’s mission as helping people to develop self-control in service to Christ. He offered the example of someone who falls into water and is ”thrashing about,” unable to swim.
“The person who learns how to swim is really free, not the person who’s thrashing about,” he said. “You put the passions to good use for the pursuit of God.”
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In a a time of “normality” for the Church it would not be seen as a “historic occasion” for a pope to meet with ministries seeking faithfulness. Yet, when popes continually support the other side like Fr. James Martin I guess it becomes a “historic occasion.”
We read: “Gannon said, the pope spoke to the group about ‘the woundedness of people,’ and how ‘Jesus Christ is always with you and you’re never alone’.”
Three comments:
FIRST, much this real and tragic “woundedness” can be traced to absentee or abusive fathers, and then the inability of sons to form the needed connection. In such cases, the drift into homosexuality is a tragic and addictive substitute for fatherhood. We are reminded here that “Jesus Christ is always with you,” AND from Christ that He and the FATHER (!) are ONE….
SECOND, a sad day in the Church– now happily in the rearview mirror– that Courage International was blacklisted from the so-called “synodal process” and that their rightful place was awarded instead to a bobblehead priest of a different color, or rainbow colors. And, that rather than addressing wounds and their causes, we might instead bless the situation and just move things along (“Fiducia Supplicans”)!
THIRD, this reader is reminded of one fatherless victim among millions, and how he then wanted to spend the rest of his life in the bubble with an older man standing in place of lost fatherhood…See below…After Washington State, dozens of other bobblehead states fell in line, and in 2015 the bobblehead U.S. Supreme Court issued its own fatwa–after having been flooded with mass produced amicus briefs from the bobblehead boardrooms of over 400 major United State Corporations.
In the real “civil rights” movement, Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Burmingham Jail” shows that he grounded his case not on ideological make-believe, but instead on reason and our inborn and universal Natural Law.
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“During testimony at a public legislative hearing in Washington State in 2012 [to legalize ‘marriage’][…] Here was a quite handsome young man in white shirt and tie whose parents divorced when he was twelve. Having been shaped by his father’s absence, he had recently met his father for whom he discovered that he now had a deep attachment. He testified that he would like to find an older man like his father to intimately share the rest of his life. The bobble heads of legislators nodded in compassionate sympathy.
“Betrayed with poor nurturing, the young man is stuck in a zone where he chooses to live in a physically intimate relationship with a same-sex father figure. He would do this rather than be a father himself in a real marriage between a man and a woman. And he wants validation under state law. [….] Only moments before in the crowded front of the chamber two sympathetic male staffers, also in white shirts and ties, embraced each other with prolonged excitement, each chortling aloud without blushing, ‘I have ‘straight’ love’. . .” (from Beaulieu, “A Generation Abandoned,” Hamilton Books, 2017).
Courage – the organization – aims to support individuals in genuine Catholic life as found in the Church’s Magisterium. Others, like Jimmy Martin SJ and his ilk among bishops, support those who have chosen to live sinful lives. There is a difference between the two and that is Jesus Christ.