PHILADELPHIA — As the World Meeting of Families, the world’s largest Catholic gathering of families, draws near, there’s a split in the family.

Advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics say the meeting is missing an opportunity by offering just one session on LGBT concerns out of dozens of panels. The event’s organizers say the one-hour session – led by a gay, celibate man – is part of their efforts to keep the programming balanced.

Pope Francis delivers his blessing from his studio overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City this week. The pontiff will attend the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia on Sept. 26 and 27 – a meeting that occurs as divides deepen in the church over LGBT issues and concerns. The Associated Press

The tension reflects the church’s ongoing struggle to test the waters on how to talk about same-sex marriage and other LGBT issues, while frustration grows among some Catholics who plunged into that conversation years ago.

“The entire Catholic Church in America is having the discussion about LGBT issues, and yet there’s no real discussion happening at the World Meeting of Families,” said Francis DeBernardo, head of New Ways Ministry, a national group pushing for greater inclusion of LGBT parishioners. “It really gives a very inaccurate view of where the Catholic people are in regard to this issue.”

DeBernardo’s is one of 30 groups that signed a letter to Pope Francis asking to meet with him when he comes here for the World Meeting in September. The group is also one of several planning workshops that week at a church a few blocks south of the main event, at the Convention Center.

Sponsored every three years by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council on the Family, the meeting comes as divides have deepened in the church worldwide over how to deal with LGBT issues – especially after Francis set off a buzz in 2013 by saying, “If a person is gay and seeks the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge him?”

In Philadelphia, as his visit nears, that buzz is approaching a roar. LGBT groups have rallied behind a teacher fired by Waldron Mercy Academy, a nondiocesan private school in Merion, for her same-sex marriage – even as Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput praised the school for upholding church doctrine.

The debate over doctrine is the backdrop to a more immediate one over the Sept. 22-27 meeting’s speakers and topics, the result of decisions by the Vatican, the Philadelphia Archdiocese and the World Meeting of Families Philadelphia 2015 organization.

The lineup is meant to reflect global issues of family life, said Mary Beth Yount, director of content and programming for the meeting and an assistant professor of pastoral and theological studies at Neumann University.

Yount said LGBT groups are not the only ones critical of a schedule limited by time and space.

To many traditional Catholics attending from the meeting from countries as far-flung as Vietnam and Nigeria, LGBT issues are not a high priority.

Yount noted that there will be just one session on divorced and remarried Catholics, one on disabilities and one on family finance – and one on homosexuality.

Ron Belgau, editor of a website called Spiritual Friendship, is to speak, along with his mother, at a session titled “Always Consider the Person: Homosexuality in the Family.” He is gay and celibate.

“I accept and try to advocate for the church’s teaching on sexual ethics,” Belgau said, “but I am also not banging people over the head with that. I do advocate for celibacy, but I do think there’s a tendency in the current conversations to make a much bigger deal of that.”

Belgau said he thinks LGBT Catholics are cast out of the church more than others who do not live in accordance with its teachings, such as by divorcing or using contraception.

Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, a national Catholic LGBT group, said Belgau’s role in the meeting is a step, if a small one.

“The good news is, gay issues are going to be talked about openly – it’s on the official agenda, and that’s a step forward, and I want to make clear we have no objection to gay people who choose celibacy,” Duddy-Burke said. “But it presents a limited view, to say the least, and an unrealistic view of how most gay Catholics and their families live.”

On one contentious issue, there is some accord: conversion therapy, the theory that homosexuality can be “cured.”

Yount said World Meeting of Families organizers rejected putting this topic on its schedule.Even so, one critic of the lineup says some speakers previously advocated the therapy in books or blogs, some dating back 10 or more years.

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