Organizations
Outreach is an LGBTQ Catholic resource. We offer news, essays, resources and community for LGBTQ Catholics and those who minister with them in the Catholic Church worldwide. Outreach also highlights welcoming parishes, schools and other Catholic organizations.
Our website features original articles from theologians, scholars, church leaders, family members and many others, both lay and clergy. It also provides information about our conferences and gatherings.
Outreach operates under the auspices of America Media, a Jesuit ministry, and is rooted in the love of Jesus, who reached out to all those who felt excluded.
James Martin, S.J.
FOUNDER
James Martin, S.J., is a Jesuit priest, the editor at large at America Media and founder of Outreach. He is also a consultor to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication and a member of the Synod of Bishops. Father Martin is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, Jesus: A Pilgrimage and Learning to Pray. His most recent book is Come Forth: The Promise of Jesus’s Greatest Miracle. His book Building a Bridge, about LGBTQ Catholics, has been translated into nine languages.
Michael J. O’Loughlin
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Michael J. O’Loughlin is the executive director of Outreach. He is the author of “Hidden Mercy: Catholics, AIDS, and Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear,”which is based on the America podcast series, “Plague: Untold Stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church.” He also authored The Tweetable Pope: A Spiritual Revolution in 140 Characters.
New Ways Ministry is a Catholic outreach that educates and advocates for equity, inclusion, and justice for LGBTQ+ persons, equipping leaders to build bridges of dialogue within the Church and civil society.
New Ways Ministry’s core commitments include:
Promoting dialogue and reconciliation grounded in the unity and diversity of the Body of Christ (I Cor 12:12)
Becoming anti-racist in our programming, publications, and internal operations
Supporting research and resources that empower pastoral ministers and educators to advance an intersectional understanding of gender identity and sexuality
Fostering holiness and wholeness within the Catholic LGBTQ+ community and allies through spiritual programs and resources
Dignity USA: Vision
DignityUSA envisions and works for a time when lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual Catholics and their allies are affirmed and experience dignity through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality and/or gender identity and can participate fully in all aspects of life within the Church and society as beloved persons of God. We uphold anti-racism as an essential part of our ethos and recognize that every individual possesses inherent dignity by virtue of being created by God, redeemed by Christ, and sanctified by the Holy Spirit through Baptism.
Mission Statement
Fortunate Families, a Catholic Family, Friends & Allies Ministry, supports LGBTQ+ siblings by facilitating respectful conversation with bishops, pastors and Church leadership, through sharing personal stories and by working to establish intentional Catholic LGBTQ+ Ministry Sites in dioceses, parishes, educational institutions, and communities.
Through accompaniment and bridge-building we seek to celebrate and safeguard the dignity of LGBTQ+ children of God.
Transgender Ministry of Accompaniment
The Ministry of Accompaniment to transgender and non-binary persons is an expression of our commitment to them as members of the Body of Christ.
Essential to this commitment is an understanding of the many issues that affect their personal and spiritual well-being and that of their families.
The full program consists of 15 videos, each approximately 60 minutes in length recorded via zoom during formation of a group of pastoral ministers in 2021/2022, and in 2024. Each video examines a different aspect of the lives of transgender and non-binary persons. Additional reading materials for each video will be recommended by the program facilitator.
Presenters include religious, subject experts, spouses, parents, and transgender and non-binary persons themselves.
Sister Luisa Derouen is a Dominican Sister of Peace and has been ministering among transgender people and their families nationally for decades.
It is her desire that these formation sessions be used in service of those who wish to be a supportive presence of God to transgender and non-binary persons in their journey to wholeness.
Sister Luisa Derouen
Without Exception
A Network to Support LGBTQ+ Ministry in Catholic High Schools
Catholic faith professes that all of creation was formed in a state of journeying. Along the line of salvation history, through the grace of the Incarnation, God became man in the person of Jesus Christ to journey with us and show us the path to holiness. "The way" includes a commitment to faithfulness and justice, a commitment to God and others, as a means of building up the Kingdom of God, which reigns among us. But discipleship is a choice.
The sacramental worldview of Catholic faith offers us the choice to participate in the fullness of God's creation or not. How can we love a God we cannot see if we are not able to love the neighbor we can see? This requires humility and vulnerability, but also sacrifice. The grandeur and frailty of our own humanity invites us to hold these complexities in tension: visible and invisible; human and divine; faith and works; honesty and discretion; truth and love; mercy and justice.
Without Exception seeks to walk the narrow ridge between right belief and right practice, between the Catholic intellectual tradition and Catholic social teaching, between what Pope Francis calls "desk-bound theology" and "field hospital ministry." In this state of journeying, we desire to walk with all of God's people—including our LGBTQ+ children—as missionary disciples.