Pope Leo XIV Enlists Gay Designer for Vestments, Signaling Openness to LGBT Inclusion
Papal outfitter markets premium homoerotic perfumes and is a member of a gay activist organization
Demonstrating a welcoming attitude to the LGBT community, Pope Leo XIV sought the talents of a well-known Italian homosexual designer to tailor his chasuble and mitre for his inaugural Mass on May 18.
Filippo Sorcinelli, a flamboyant 50-year-old gay activist who markets a premium brand of homoerotic perfumes for men, told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on Monday that he was invited to tailor the vestments for Pope Leo’s first Mass as pontiff.
“I received a somewhat vague WhatsApp message, telling me that the pope had liked some pieces I had made, and asked me to make them to size,” he said. “I asked if it was for Sunday mass (in a couple of days), the answer was: you do it.”
The Italian designer, who is a Catholic, emphasized that he recognized “the sacred vestment(s) is an extension of faith,” including his own. “Many of my colleagues forget this and end up creating theatrical costumes. Beautiful, but unsuitable.”
The internationally renowned tailor said he worked on the new pope’s vestments day and night, but it was worth it. “They also buried Francis with one of my mitres,” he said. “But I only found out about it afterwards: an immense honour, which moved me greatly.”
Asked how he lives out his homosexual lifestyle openly while designing robes for the popes, Sorcinelli admitted that “it was a great battle, and a great victory.” The designer has dressed the last three popes: Benedict XVI, who first commissioned him; Francis, with whom he established a strong bond; and most recently, Leo XIV.
“In the Church, it is easy to make enemies, especially if you run into some extreme, far-right fringe groups. In recent years, they have written terrible things about me to attack Bergoglio,” he remarked.
Pope’s Designer Markets Homoerotic Perfumes
Reports have accused Sorcinelli of using “sacrilegious, satanic, and sexual imagery” to market his perfumes. On his website, he advertises his four fragrances as “extrait de perversion” (perversion extract), which “for the first time … shamelessly recount the needs, desires, and their own manifestations of human pleasure, in its complex erotic dimension.”
Sorcinelli, who boasts of creating in just two and a half days a decorated white chasuble for Francis to wear at his inaugural Mass in 2013, markets the homoerotic perfumes under the “ambiguous and provocative name XSÉ” — a “graphically captivating name” which appears on his products with the X above the SÉ, spelling out SÉX to the viewer. He advertises the perfumes for the man “ready to differentiate … himself from the others that surround him” — a subtle gay allusion.
The fragrances carry the label “parental advisory: explicit perfume” and are described as “a journey through spirituality and harmony, in the constant and daring search for beauty.” The four perfumes in the “perversion extract” range are named “Popper-Pop,” “Cyber-Sex,” “Cruising-Area,” and “Slightly-B!tch.” One of the ads for the line features a demon-like figure bathed in red light with a head mask and collar, which are BDSM accessories.
Sorcinelli describes himself as “a man who communicates through the signs of his continuous free living, without artifice.” He has been a church organist since the age of 13 and says his other line, the “extrait de musique” (musical extract) brand, is a “sensual and rough” fragrance “whose names and bottles are a faithful reproduction of the registers of the Grand Organ of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris.”
Sorcinelli says his wide range of 27 perfumes is produced by a Milan-based company, which translates his experiences into fragrance “with which I have explored the world of identity and sexuality in this pandemic year.” In his advertisement, he says he wants “to articulate the uniqueness of an intense and sincere journey, suffered and spiritual.”
Tailor Belongs to Gay Activist Organization
Several Italian media outlets report that the stylist is a card-carrying member of Arcigay, Italy’s first and largest gay activist organization, which campaigns for “equal marriage rights and the recognition of LGBTI parenting rights” — not recognized under Italian law.
A dispute over Sorcinelli’s homosexual activism was first flagged in a letter signed by four members of the Center for Liturgical Action objecting to his membership in Arcigay.
A source close to Sorcinelli, who spoke highly of his skills, told The Stream that the “autobiographical note [in his perfume ad] is a reference to the designer’s personal struggle between his Catholic faith and his homosexuality.”
“In many ways, Sorcinelli is more faithful to his Catholicism than homosexual clergy who clandestinely play out their homosexual urges while remaining in the closet,” said the source, who lives in Milan. “He often goes to Mass and loves the traditional Latin Mass, but tends not to receive Holy Communion. I suspect he may have changed his stance given Francis’s affirmation of Catholic homosexual couples.”
Sorcinelli is the founder of a liturgical vestments company, Lavs Atelier, which creates sacred vestments for Catholic clergy all over the world.
Designer Describes His Vocation As a Catholic
Sorcinelli says he “considered the idea of entering the seminary as a child, because faith has always played an important role in my life. But then I realized that that wasn’t the only way to serve God, and I followed other paths.
“Becoming a stylist was not in my plans, I had never thought about it,” he muses, reflecting on how his “fascination with the sacred was born” as a child “plunging your hands into the fabric of the vestments, surrounded by the scent of incense and the music of the organ.”
When a friend contacted Sorcinelli in 2001, revealing he was about to take his vows for the priesthood, “I instinctively told him not to buy a chasuble because I would give it to him,” he recalls, recounting how he designed his first vestment and stitched it with help from his aunt and sister.
“I was returning from Rome, where I was studying at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music,” he says. In 2002, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, then archbishop of Pesaro, heard of Sorcinelli and invited him to design liturgical garments.
“Benedict XVI’s master of ceremonies then phoned me to commission me a garment for the Pontiff,” he reveals. “Although we were certainly not the only ones working for the Vatican, we became the outfitters [referred to most].”
The vestments industry is worth millions of euros, and fierce battles for contracts are fought “behind clouds of incense.” Prices for a cardinal’s outfit range from five thousand to 30 thousand euros. A papal stole costs around 900 euros, and an ivory-colored chasuble is priced at 9,000 euros.
LGBT Catholics Urge Leo to Continue Francis’s Inclusive Approach
Meanwhile, Fr. Paul Morrissey, an Augustinian friar who was one of the pioneers of gay ministry in the U.S. Catholic Church, expressed his hopes that Leo, who belongs to the same Augustinian Order, would continue Francis’s inclusive approach to the LGBT community.
“My hope for the new Pope Leo XIV is that he experiences this Beauty as a true Augustinian, and that as Pope of the whole Church, he shows us how to see this Beauty in others, especially those who are marginalized in society and the Church,” noted Morrissey, the author of Why I Remain a Gay Catholic: A Spiritual-Sexual Journey.
Pope Leo affirmed at the start of his pontificate that the family is founded on the “stable union between a man and a woman.”
When Francis made him a cardinal in 2023, he was asked about comments he made over a decade ago condemning the “homosexual lifestyle.”
“Given many things that have changed, I would say there’s been a development in the sense of the need for the church to open and to be welcoming,” he said, “and on that level, I think Pope Francis made it very clear that he doesn’t want people to be excluded simply based on choices that they make, whether it be lifestyle, work, way to dress or whatever.”
Leo, who at the time went by the name Cardinal Robert Prevost, explained, “Doctrine hasn’t changed, and people haven’t said, yet, you know, we’re looking for that kind of change, but we are looking to be more welcoming and more open, and to say all people are welcome in the church.”
Dr. Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.