James Martin
What event led to James Martin’s viral video?
What role did Pope Francis assign to James Martin?
What is James Martin’s connection to the LGBTQ community?
On June 12, 2016, a mass shooter in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killed 49 people, most of whom were members of the local LGBTQ community. The next day James Martin, a Roman Catholic priest based in New York City, posted a video about the tragedy on Facebook. Dismayed that so few U.S. Catholic bishops had released a statement condemning the shooting, Martin said, “For too long, Catholics have treated the LGBT community as other.” Invoking Catholic social teaching and its principle of solidarity, Martin also said, “Catholics have a responsibility, I think, to make everyone feel visible and valuable, especially in times of loss.”
Martin’s video immediately went viral. Although he’d written nearly a dozen books and had been an editor at the Jesuit-run magazine America since 1999, Martin quickly became the Roman Catholic Church’s go-to person for outreach to the LGTBQ community. “I see it as a continuation of Jesus’ ministry,” Martin told Encyclopædia Britannica in 2025. His work also caught the attention of Pope Francis, who made him an adviser to the Vatican’s department for communication in 2017. Dubbed “The Colbert Report’s chaplain,” Martin has built a wide audience through his appearances on television shows, his humor-filled and accessibly written books and articles, and his coverage of the 2025 papal conclave for ABC News. He also has a large following on social media, telling Britannica, “It’s a way of meeting people where they are. You have to speak [to people] in their language in order to evangelize and just proclaim the gospel.”
- Name: James Martin
- Born: December 29, 1960, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
- Occupation: Roman Catholic priest (Jesuit), author, editor at America magazine
- Notable books: My Life with the Saints (2006), Jesus: A Pilgrimage (2014), Building a Bridge (2017), Come Forth (2023), Work in Progress (2026)
- Other roles: Adviser to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications (2017– ); founder of the LGBTQ Catholic nonprofit Outreach (2022)
From Philadelphia to the corporate world
Martin was born on December 29, 1960, in Philadelphia and grew up in the suburb of Plymouth Meeting. Although he was raised Roman Catholic, he and his sister attended public schools. “We weren’t the kind of family that were super Catholic,” he told Britannica. “We didn’t say grace at meals. We didn’t pray the rosary. We didn’t talk about God much. [Religion] was kind of in the background.” Growing up, Martin had friends of many different faiths, and he worked at various odd jobs. In his 2006 spiritual memoir, My Life with the Saints, Martin shares some especially humorous stories about his time in college working as an usher at a movie theater and being conscripted as the designated popcorn maker.
In 1978 Martin began undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business, where he concentrated on finance and accounting and earned a B.S. in economics in 1982. From there he entered a corporate training program at General Electric (GE) in New York City. In My Life with the Saints, he writes, “Almost no reflection was involved in my decision. To use some accounting terminology, I simply went along with ‘generally accepted principles.’…Which job should you accept? The one with the highest salary.” He worked at GE in New York for three years and then took a job with GE Capital in Connecticut, where he worked for another three years.
A life-changing encounter
On August 15, 1534, in Paris, six young men joined Ignatius of Loyola in taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, forming what would become the Society of Jesus. On September 27, 1540, the society received approval from Pope Paul III. The new religious order was a key player in the Counter-Reformation, and Jesuits became known for their educational, missionary, and charitable works around the world.
Martin’s corporate career took a radical detour, however, after a film about American Trappist monk Thomas Merton changed his life. He told Britannica, “One day I came home and I had a miserable day at work, and I turned on the TV and there was this documentary called Merton: A Film Biography [1984]. I didn’t know who he was, but it was so captivating. Just the story of him leaving behind his life and entering the monastery was so compelling that it made me track down his book[s] The Seven Storey Mountain [1948] and then No Man Is an Island [1955]. I just thought, this seems so beautiful. What a beautiful way to live. Maybe I could live like this.” On the advice of a priest, Martin talked to some religious men at Fairfield University, a school in Connecticut run by the Jesuits, a religious order founded in the 16th century by St. Ignatius of Loyola.
Two more years passed before Martin acted on his desire to enter religious life. He told Britannica, “I got more and more miserable, and I started to see a therapist. The therapist one day said, ‘If you’re so miserable, why don’t you do something else?’ And I said, ‘What else would I do?’ At that time I was 27. It’s so funny to think of yourself as trapped at 27.”
Becoming a Jesuit
In August 1988 he began his two-year novitiate in the Jesuits’ New England Province in Boston. During this stage, he worked at the Nativity Mission Center, a school for boys in New York City, and with Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, in Kingston, Jamaica, among other ministries. In 1990 he professed his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and was then sent to study philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, where he worked with gangs and at a homeless shelter.
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From 1992 to 1994 Martin lived in Nairobi, Kenya, to work with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS). He told Britannica, “I worked with refugees from all over East Africa, from Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia. We helped them start small businesses to help support their families and themselves. We started a shop called the Mikono Centre—[mikono] is the Swahili word for ‘hands’—to help market their handicrafts. And that shop’s still going.” Martin says his work with JRS is the part of his life he’s most proud of. “I often say that if I ever get to heaven, that’s what I’ll say to God.” (In My Life with the Saints, Martin notes the irony of having left the corporate world behind only to end up mining his business training for JRS. “I marveled at the way God had put my business education to good use.…At times it seemed as if God had planned it this way all along.”)
He then returned to New York to serve as an associate editor at America for one year, before heading to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study theology at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology (now the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry). In 1998 he received his master’s degree in divinity and was ordained a deacon. The following year he received a master’s in theology and was ordained a priest.
Martin’s journey to becoming a priest was not easy. When he first told his family and friends about his decision to enter religious life, he received little support. “My parents were very upset, as was my sister,” he told Britannica. “They didn’t try to block it, but they were just upset. They thought I was wasting my education at Wharton. Some of my friends thought I was joining a cult, and I didn’t really have many people to speak about it with. I pretty much just did it on my own.”
Editor at America and first books
Martin joined the Jesuits because, as he told Britannica, “I just felt this kind of connection. I liked the fact that you could do almost anything and be a Jesuit priest or brother. You could be a teacher and a Jesuit. You could be a writer and a Jesuit. You could be a parish priest and a Jesuit. You could be a social worker and a Jesuit. You could be a prison chaplain and a Jesuit. I found that the variety of things that they did appealed to me.”
“I love writing. I’ve never understood writer’s block. Now, the difference is I don’t have to write on assignment. People aren’t forcing me to write things that I don’t want to write. I write what I want to write, which is a great blessing. All of my earnings, my royalties, go to my Jesuit community. I don’t have to worry about a book not doing well. I don’t write to put food on the table. I’m quite free and freer than most other writers. I feel like it’s a vocation within a vocation.” —James Martin
Indeed, Martin has pursued a variety of paths for his vocation (spiritual calling). Since 1999 he has worked full-time as an editor at America. His first book, This Our Exile: A Spiritual Journey with the Refugees of East Africa, was published in 1999. The following year he wrote about his experience as a Jesuit novice in the book In Good Company: The Fast Track from the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. His work with first responders after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center is the topic of Searching for God at Ground Zero (2002). In My Life with the Saints Martin reflects on how religious figures such as Merton, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, Peter the Apostle, Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, and the Martyrs of Uganda influenced his spiritual development. Jesus: A Pilgrimage (2014) is about the life of Christ and Martin’s visits to sites in the Holy Land.
LGBTQ ministry and Outreach
“This is something that Pope Francis asked me to continue doing.” —James Martin on his LGBTQ ministry
Martin is best known for his work with the LGBTQ community. After his viral Facebook post about the Orlando shooting, he was invited to give a talk with New Ways Ministry, a Catholic outreach group for the LGBTQ community. “That led to a book called Building a Bridge [2017], and that led to being invited by the Vatican to give these talks,” he told Britannica. “It also led to lots of invitations and lots of protests too, lots of really hateful comments and canceled talks and protests.”
Some Roman Catholics have objected to Martin’s LGBTQ ministry, citing the teaching in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that calls homosexuality “objectively disordered.” Yet Martin has pointed out that the catechism also says the LGBTQ community should be treated with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity.” He told Britannica, “In the gospels we see Jesus, who is continually reaching out to people on the margins. He’s always going to people who feel excluded or marginalized or ignored or ostracized. I see [this] as a continuation of Jesus’ ministry.” Martin also points out that his ministry aligns with Roman Catholic social teaching’s principle of standing in solidarity with marginalized people and those who are struggling or suffering.
In 2018 Martin gave a talk on LGBTQ topics at the Vatican’s World Meeting of Families in Dublin. “The first time they ever talked about that [topic],” Martin told Britannica. The event inspired him to start Outreach, an umbrella organization of online resources for LGBTQ Catholics and allies. Founded in 2022, Outreach aims “to raise up people, parishes, schools and other Catholic ministries and organizations that offer inspiring stories and provide a home for LGBTQ people.” The organization has grown to host retreats and conferences that include panel sessions with LGBTQ clergy, women religious, and theologians. Martin told Britannica, “It’s not something that I really sat down and planned. It just happened step by step. And at each step I asked the permission of my Jesuit superiors, and I kept the pope informed. It just kind of grew. It’s amazing to me really.”
Other roles, projects, and books
Two years after being made an adviser to the Vatican’s Secretariat (now Dicastery) for Communication in 2017, Martin had his first private meeting with Pope Francis. In 2024 Martin helped arrange for several American comedians, including Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Whoopi Goldberg, Jim Gaffigan, and Chris Rock, to meet Francis for a gathering at the Vatican with other comics from around the world.
Martin was appointed a delegate at the church’s Synod on Synodality in 2023, during which he sat at the same table as Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Prevost. In May 2025 Prevost was elected Pope Leo XIV, becoming the first American pontiff. Since covering the papal election for ABC, Martin is often asked to weigh in on the new pope. “He’s smart, he’s listening, he’s thoughtful, he’s reflective. I have lots of hopes for Pope Leo,” Martin told Britannica.
In September 2025 Martin had his first private audience with Leo. After their meeting, Martin posted on Instagram, “The message I received was that Pope Leo will be continuing with the same openness and welcome that Francis showed to LGBTQ people.”
Martin’s work has become visible to many non-Roman-Catholics through his frequent appearances on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and his cameos in such projects as Martin Scorsese’s film The Irishman (2019; Father Martin plays, you guessed it, a priest) and documentary series The Saints (2024–25). Among Martin’s other books are Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life (2011), Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone (2021), and Come Forth: The Promise of Jesus’s Greatest Miracle (2023), about the biblical story of Lazarus.
In 2025 Martin launched the podcast The Spiritual Life. His autobiography, Work in Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest, was published in 2026.