A Foot in the Door

Last December, with Pope Francis’s approval, the Vatican released a declaration authorizing Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples “without officially validating their status.” Continuing to prohibit “liturgical blessings”—like the rites and prayers of a marriage ceremony—the declaration Fiducia Supplicans nevertheless allowed priests to offer non-ritualized, spontaneous blessings for same-sex couples who ask for God’s grace. The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) took pains to clarify—in the document itself, and in a remarkable two-thousand-word press release issued more than two weeks later—that these blessings would not “condone” same-sex couples or soften the Church’s ultra-conservative teachings on marriage. The true innovation, the DDF insisted, was less about same-sex couples and more a development of Francis’s vision of pastoral care.

However subtle the innovation, it’s extraordinary compared to even recent Vatican history. In 2003, the DDF—then called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the theologian who became Pope Benedict XVI—laid out the Church’s “emphatic” opposition to civil recognition of same-sex unions. “Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons,” Ratzinger’s DDF stated, “need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil.” In 1999, the DDF barred Sister Jeannine Gramick and the Reverent Robert Nugent, the founders of the LGBTQ-affirming Catholic group New Ways Ministry, from “any pastoral work involving homosexual persons.” In 1992, a Vatican commission chaired by Ratzinger finalized the official Catechism of the Catholic Church, which labeled homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered” and contrary to natural law.

But now we have a Pope who publicly supports same-sex civil unions—even as his private conversations sometimes point in confusing directions. We have a green(ish) light for transgender baptism, and we have Fiducia Supplicans. These Vatican actions mirror an astonishing and broad liberalization of popular Catholic attitudes toward LGBTQ persons. According to a 2019 poll, 61 percent of U.S. Catholics expressed support for same-sex civil marriage rights; in Western Europe, the majorities are even greater (between 70 and 75 percent in Spain, France, and Germany). In Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and the Philippines, between 70 and 80 percent of Catholics support greater social acceptance of homosexuality.

So do these modern shifts in guidance and attitudes mean the Church is finally coming around on homosexuality? The answer is, in true Vatican tradition, undoubtedly yes and undoubtedly no. One challenge is that “the Church” is really a corpus of three thousand dioceses. While bishops in Europe, the United States, and India have received Fiducia Supplicans with acceptance or even enthusiasm, other bishops in Eastern Europe, Central Africa, and Central Asia expressed wariness or outright condemnation. As the Reverend James Martin S.J. details in his book Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity, the Roman Catholic Church is “speaking to the entire world, not just the West and certainly not just the United States.” What seems tepid in the United States can sound incendiary in other parts of the world, especially in countries where LGBTQ persons are subject to imprisonment, state-sanctioned torture, and execution. In Nigeria, for instance, where the Catholic bishops staunchly oppose any blessings for same-sex couples, a 2013 law criminalizes same-sex sexual activity, same-sex relationships, and even going to gay clubs or organizations with up fourteen years imprisonment.

Thus, in the press release on Fiducia Supplicans, the DDF noted the “delicate situation of some countries”—no one writes quite so exquisitely as a Vatican prefect—where a blessing would be “imprudent.” “It is clear that the Bishops do not wish to expose homosexual persons to violence,” the DDF added. This is an elegant and preposterous reframing of the objecting bishops’ opposition, which has since escalated into fighting words like “sacrilegious,” “heresy,” and “evil.”

Then, in April, the DDF dropped another surprise release: Dignitas Infinita, which, in the course of expounding on universal human dignity, rebukes such grave violations as war, human trafficking, and . . . “gender theory.” Yes, gender theory: Judith Butler made the short list alongside human trafficking. Also singled out for Vatican condemnation is “sex change,” which evokes that “age-old temptation to make oneself God.” For, the declaration insists, our creation “is prior to us and must be received as a gift,” including “the body [that] serves as the living context in which the interiority of the soul unfolds and manifests itself.”

The easy narrative is that Dignitas Infinita is a corrective after the fallout over Fiducia Supplicans. As conservative Catholic pundit Ross Douthat writes, after years of Francis balancing Church conservatives and progressives “but favoring the latter,” this document “puts a limit to that favoritism, a this-far-no-further.” Over at New Ways Ministry, executive director Francis DeBernardo doesn’t buy it: “I think the latest document was a mistake, and that it did great harm to the progress that was being made. I see it as an anomaly.” The DDF was working on a statement on gender identity well before Fiducia Supplicans, he says, as a follow-up to an unpopular 2019 Vatican edict on gender in Catholic schools, just as the “blessings for gays” declaration followed up on a 2021 “no blessings for gays” document with which the pope was reportedly unhappy. 

But the more basic way to reconcile these two documents is to recognize that for the Church, bodies have always been the sticking point. The Vatican extends a blessing to same-sex couples but not to the sex they have. The Pope supports legal recognition of such a couple’s love but not bodily recognition. Gay men in seminaries can be tolerated, but no “frociaggine,” please. And sex change, as a physical gender transgression, is a “grave violation” of human dignity.

In Building a Bridge, Martin’s exhortation to mutual understanding brackets sex altogether, “since it is an area on which the two sides are simply too far apart.” Any rapprochement will have to be articulated around it. This is familiar thinking to Catholics, especially queer Catholics. As the gay author (and ambivalent Irish Catholic) Colm Toíbín writes, “That you were gay was something you managed to know about and not know at the same time. This is almost an aspect of the Catholic religion itself.” Paradox and ambiguity are doctrinal modes: this is and is not bread; God is three and one; bless the couple but not the sex.

And the Vatican is no stranger to using exquisite subtleties to patch radical divisions across a global church. The DDF’s first name, after all, was the Inquisition.

Another way to frame these churchly ambiguities is in terms of pastoral care. If anything, Francis’s theology of sexuality is traditional, explains DeBernardo; but at the parish level, the pope believes those sexual teachings shouldn’t be a barrier to welcoming people into the Church. “[That] shouldn’t even be considered when thinking about giving communion to someone or allowing them [to have] roles in the parish,” DeBernardo tells me. The Church doesn’t gatekeep over its many other sexual teachings—no priest is asking, say, the married couple with one child whether they’re using artificial birth control before handing over the Eucharist. Francis signaled this approach in his 2016 exhortation Amoris Laetitia, emphasizing pastoral efforts to accompany, forgive, and “above all integrate.” The Church being “one body” in Christ, the faithful “may not wound that same Body” with line-drawing and divisions.

That image of the Church as the mystical Body of Christ comes from Saint Paul, particularly his First Letter to the Corinthians: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” It’s an important passage for New Ways Ministry, Martin, and other LGBTQ-affirming ministries. It is, DeBernardo observes, a scriptural requirement to respect the Church’s diversity:

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor.

To articulate LGBTQ Catholics as members of that body, contributing their own “charism,” or gift, to that body, can be a radical proposition. “There are clearly men and women in heaven who are LGBTQ,” Martin told me in an email interview. “How could there not be?” He sees one candidate in Cardinal Saint John Henry Newman. Saint Joan of Arc is, naturally, beloved by trans Catholics. And DeBernardo suggests Saint John of the Cross, whose poem The Dark Night of the Soul depicts a man leaving a monastery to meet a male lover. Okay, so the male lover is God—but that doesn’t make it any less homoerotic.

If all members of the mystical Body of Christ contribute a charism, what might the queer charism be? The gay author Anthony Oliveira (another ambivalent Catholic) observes that LGBTQ people are very good at the kind of radical extension of the family that Jesus preaches in the Gospels. “[Jesus] doesn’t think there’s anything interesting or special about the family, except in as much as whatever you’re doing there has to be horizontalized to everybody,” he says. “The thing that is really good at that is queerness.” We celebrate our found families and practice mutual aid; we find each other outside the family dynamic because so many of us were pushed out of their original families. And nothing typifies this horizontalized ethos so starkly as the worst plague years of the AIDS crisis, when LGBTQ communities, especially lesbian communities, practiced an extraordinary charity in caring for their dying gay brothers. Rebecca Brown, the lesbian writer (and Catholic convert) who won a Lambda Literary Award for her portrait of AIDS home care in The Gifts of the Body, stated in an interview in BOMB in 2022 that this spiritual socialism is precisely what drew her to Catholicism: “What is your job? Your job is to feed the hungry, cloth[e] the naked, welcome the stranger, welcome the refugee.”

When I think of gays, mutual aid, and the Roman Catholic Church, I think of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the San Francisco order of drag nuns who ministered to the ravaged Castro with street-level community services and AIDS activism from the first years of the crisis. It was 1982 when Sister Roz Erection and Sister Florence Nightmare released the nation’s first sex-positive and accessible guide to safer sex AIDS prevention. When I was out in the Castro, in the early aughts, and I saw a bearded nun in white pancake face, a flowing black habit, and Sailor Moon buns distributing condoms or making sure the plastered twink at the bar got home safe, I understood the costume as both an irreverence and homage: the semiotics are illegible unless one understands a Catholic nun to mean charity, moral authority, and community trust. If the Sisters were body parts, they’d be the feet: offensive, ridiculous, and indispensable, pavement-pounders, dogsbody drag queens. Saint Paul’s one-body metaphor exhorts a comfortable whole to be more accepting of its weirdos, but it leaves little imaginative space for the lived experience of these “less respectable parts.” If the Church is a body, it’s one that doesn’t want to take its socks off.

Last year, Republican senator Marco Rubio stoked a public outrage cycle over the Sisters, scandalized by their Easter Day Hunky Jesus and Foxy Mary contest and a pub crawl “mocking the Stations of the Cross and even the Eucharist.” Bishop Robert Barron asserted the Sisters “can only be described as an anti-Catholic hate group.” But is that the only way to look at it? The Catholic Church’s long history has its share of bawdy satires and carnival inversions. Irreverence could be one of the gifts LGBTQ Catholics offer the Church—as critique, as a corrective against pompousness and cheerlessness, as a leaven of joy in a religion that often seems to fetishize guilt and pain. If the terms of Church welcome are a queer respectability politic, however, integration along the Pope’s vision will fail disastrously. For queer Catholics, an acceptance conditioned on self-censorship and concealment simply rebuilds the closet. For the Church, bowdlerized integration obscures the real value that outsiders offer majorities when difference is seen as not just tolerable but invigorating.

Drag is not—or not only—parody. A pub-crawl Stations of the Cross is tacky, but it isn’t necessarily a mockery. Queer people imitate and playact sometimes as our own effort to integrate, sticking things in our mouths to see what we make of them.

And Catholicism is a delicious religion, rich with musks and high drama, a community of human behavior so old and variegated that, by necessity, it includes its share of the bizarre and fabulous. What can you do with Saint Catherine of Siena, in her ecstatic vision, taking Christ’s clipped foreskin as her wedding ring? What about Saint Wilgefortis, the crucified bearded lady? My personal favorite is Saint Didymus, a fourth-century soldier, secretly Christian, serving the Roman governor of Antioch; when fellow Christian Theodora refuses to make sacrifice to the Roman gods, the governor condemns her to serve as a prostitute in the Temple of Venus and sends his most brutish soldiers to rape her that night. Didymus hurries to her rescue, and then—in a contrivance so gratuitous, I love it with all my heart—he insists on trading clothes with her. She will escape in his armor, and he will take her place, in prostitute’s veils. Handel’s oratorio Theodora comes perilously close to asking the critical question: What exactly is Didymus anticipating will happen when the other soldiers arrive? To which Didymus (sung by a castrato, to make this even gayer) replies:

Fear not for me; the pow’r that led me hither
Will guard me hence. If not, His will be done!

Is it any wonder that LGBTQ people would be drawn to this menagerie in figuring themselves out?—to Saint Wilgefortis, or Saint John of the Cross, or David and Jonathan, or even Jesus and “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” All these figures appear in Anthony Oliveira’s new novel Dayspring, which refigures the lives of Christ and this beloved disciple as a gloriously queer, sweat-stained, tragi-cosmic romance. Dayspring collapses categories of sacred and profane, not just for shock and blasphemy but to insist on a theological point—to show what incarnation must mean. In the novel’s rendering of the Last Supper, as Jesus washes the feet of “twelve embarrassed workmen” in a dim upper room, “the sharp reek of corn-chip and beer-sour esters mixes with the warm shimmer of myrrh.” That is to say, the God who created feet is going to love feet. In another rendering, while the beloved disciple, John, watches Doubting Thomas “shove his filthy faithless merchant finger” into the risen Christ’s side-wound, he remembers a morning with Jesus, “running the saddle of my thumb down the small of your back tracing the dark black cowlick whorl there,” then “down the fault-line,” then, “begging forgiveness i began to press earnestly against the firm bud knot that shyly ties you shut.” Joining Thomas’s fingering to John’s, Oliveira offers a collage of sacred boundary-violations, which also includes Saint Catherine’s and Julian of Norwich’s visions of nursing from Christ’s side-wound like a breast, and the gay poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s lush “Sonnet to an Asshole.” Each of these signs reimagines an outrageous transgression as a gift insistently given, marrying Christian concepts of grace to the erotic and vice versa. For Oliveira’s John, the sexual is his spiritual machinery. “To reproach mystics with loving God by means of the faculty of sexual love is as though one were to reproach a painter with making pictures by means of colours composed of material substances,” Oliveira quotes Simone Weil. “We haven’t anything else with which to love.”

“What separates Catholicism from other Christian denominations is that it is incarnational and sacramental,” explains DeBernardo. Incarnational: we see God in real tangible things in the world. Sacramental: symbols are important. “The Catholic Church isn’t just an institution of language,” he says, “it’s an institution of art,” and art’s capaciousness invites or even obligates the interpreter to connect these symbols to their own lived experience. Catholic art, and thus the Catholic religion, gives a peculiar dignity to a subject’s efforts to understand their self, the world, and their place in the world through its “spiritual treasury,” a continuity of imagination and introspection across two millennia of human experience. And it’s an embodied imaginary—incarnational—Rebecca Brown cites “the rituals with water, oil, bread, wine. The rituals of standing, kneeling, sitting, the laying on of hands, the bending of the head in prayer, the baptism by water, making the sign of the cross, the Sacraments as signs of divine presence.” Brown’s work, especially The Gifts of the Body, knows how important physical experience is to metaphysical experience: its careful description of washing and moisturizing an AIDS patient’s skin is as mysterious and holy as Jesus giving utmost care to the smelly feet of his friends.

We haven’t anything else with which to love: the drama of queerness is all embodied too. Our interior sense of difference, our struggle into our truer selves, plays out on a stage of bodies. Even a life of chastity, the Church’s official instruction to Catholics with same-sex desire, is an embodied drama played out in the negative. Our identities, in this sense, are downstream of activity. We work ourselves out in acting or not acting on bodies and calibrate our sense of self afterward. Particularly because of Toíbín’s double-thinking—“this business of knowing and not knowing”—often we can’t figure it out except in practice. Do I like girls? Do I like being a girl? Taste and see. Try again.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus heals a blind man by putting his saliva on the man’s eyes, but, wonderfully, the first effort doesn’t take: “Can you see anything?” Jesus asks, and the man replies gingerly, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” Fully divine, fully human, Jesus gets it on the second try. (Oliveira, in Dayspring: “as though he were calibrating lenses at the optometrist / till he got the slobber ratio right.”) Some miracles require a sequence of attempts.

Oliveira tells me he sequenced the episodes in Dayspring out of chronological order to mirror how most Catholics first encounter the life of Christ: as readings at Mass, ordered at seeming random throughout the year. He even wanted to publish the novel as a box of notes the reader had to order themselves. That’s the queer experience: we arrive at coherence out of disorganized and embodied experience over a period of years, decades, just like Catholics coming to understand their cosmic place through a period of encounters. Standing and kneeling, eating, holding hands, not holding hands, saying lines people have said a million times before, mulling over it all on the walk home. Just like Dignitas Infinita says: “The body serves as the living context in which the interiority of the soul unfolds and manifests itself.”

And here is another reason why Dignitas Infinita is so frustrating a document: it articulates profound truths while being profoundly unsophisticated about them. To take just one example: situating the “masculine and feminine” as part of a created truth “prior to all our decisions and experiences” is, or could be, to offer a spiritual model for transgender identity, in which the trans subject’s inner, God-created experience of masculine and feminine overwhelms their external, socially imposed experience of gender. The drama of conversion—Saul blinded by heavenly light and overthrown, remade as Paul—urges Christians to understand one’s inner self as a truth that must be arrived at, sometimes with surprise or even fear. Just so, the queer subject is always born again; as Oliveira’s Christ puts it, “shaken to pieces / refashioned entirely / and made new” by love. If the Vatican’s theologians were more curious, the evidence of created queer truths, prior to experience but which must be discovered through experience, might intrigue them.

Doesn’t infinite dignity call for inexhaustible curiosity? Doesn’t being naturae rationabilis individua substantia (an “individual substance of a rational nature”) by its very terms compel exploration and experiment? For the Pope’s vision of pastoral integration to succeed, the Body must be interested in itself. More than compassion, more than welcome: only a Church that is prepared to find itself enriched by the encounter with creation’s diversity can call itself catholic. For now, the Vatican’s exquisite ambiguities may be what allows such encounters to happen at all. But in the long run, a consensus tolerance that brackets sex is impossible. It attempts the very divorce that queer and Catholic experience alike resists: love from fucking, flesh from spirit. The draw of Catholicism is that we encounter the spiritual in the flesh; we receive God by swallowing him.