A nun who started a long-running Catholic ministry in Mount Rainier that focuses on LGBTQ+ outreach has received historic praise from Pope Francis.

Founded in 1977, New Ways Ministry has long advocated for equal treatment of LGBTQ+ Catholics and a reconciliation between the church and the community.

In a handwritten letter sent in December, Pope Francis thanked co-founder Sister Jeannine Gramick for her 50 years of “closeness, compassion and tenderness.”

“You have not been afraid of ‘closeness,’ and in getting close you did it ‘suffering with’ [compassion] and without condemning anyone, but with the ‘tenderness’ of a sister and a mother,” he wrote.

The letter, written in the pope’s native Spanish, represents a shift for the Catholic Church, which holds that LGBTQ+ people are “objectively disordered.” In an extremely rare move, the Vatican publicly barred Sister Jeannine and co-founder Father Robert Nugent from ministry in 1999, calling their LGBTQ+ friendly teachings “erroneous and dangerous.”

Gramick told the Hyattsville Wire she was surprised when she received the letter from Pope Francis although she had recently written to him about celebrating 50 years being an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community within the Catholic Church.

Born and raised in Philadelphia where she attended Catholic school, Gramick said the nuns at her school had a big influence on her because they were kind and loving and she wanted to emulate that and be a channel for god’s love to others.

Gramick entered the convent in Baltimore in 1960 and later attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. Her friendship with a gay man there inspired her to become an advocate for gay rights in the Catholic Church.

In 1976, she moved to Mount Rainier to work with the Quixote Center, a Catholic peace and justice center, now located in Greenbelt. Gramick began workshops on gay rights for the Catholic community, as well as working on causes for the poor and marginalized. A year later she founded New Ways Ministry and has been a resident of Mount Rainier ever since.

“I like the area because it’s eco-friendly, we are a nuclear-free zone, we have lots of trees, and the city encourages us to plant trees,” Gramick told the Wire. “I like it because of the people. They are people who are really attuned to justice. It’s a wonderful community to live in.”

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