Gay Priest-Painter Makes New Icon for Father James Martin’s LGBT Event

Openly gay priest Father William McNichols has created a new icon of Pope Francis kissing Jesus Christ’s feet for Father James Martin’s August LGBT outreach event.

The painting shows Pope Francis kissing the feet of Christ, who appears after the resurrection in a hoodie and jeans with his wounded hands and feet, surrounded by two same-sex couples embracing.

Father Martin, a Jesuit priest and gay rights activist, said that he requested the work from Father McNichols — whom he describes as “one of the world’s most renowned iconographers” — for his LGBT Outreach conference at Georgetown University.

The original painting of “The Foot Washing” now hangs in New York in the media headquarters of America magazine, the Jesuits’ flagship publication in the United States.

Father McNichols’ icons, paintings and images “hang in Catholic churches, as well as colleges and universities, around the world,” Father Martin said.

McNichols was also one of three keynote speakers at the Outreach conference, “during which he shared his journey as a Catholic priest and artist,” Martin said.

Martin notes that among his many ministries, McNichols “was one of the first Catholic priests to work with people with H.I.V./AIDS in New York City during the 1980s.” McNichols, himself a former Jesuit, came out as gay in 1983.

In describing his choice of topic for his new painting, McNichols said that foot washing is an image that symbolically defines Pope Francis’s papacy.

“When James Martin, S.J., asked me to create an image for LGBTQ people and the Outreach conference, I thought first of Jesus washing their feet,” he said. “Then another idea emerged, of Jesus sitting with them, and Pope Francis washing the feet of Jesus and his outcast followers.”

This painting is “set in the cosmos,” McNichols added, “because the acceptance of LGBTQ people remains still in the present and into the future — something to come.”

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