New Article Examines Role LGBTQ+ Issues Play in Exodus of Catholics from the Church

“What happens to the Catholic Church if all the good people leave?”

Growing up as a queer Catholic, Meg Stapleton Smith often asked herself this question and returned over and over to a troubling answer: “You are then responsible for the future of the church.”

When you combine the large number of people leaving the church with the pandemic-related drops in Mass attendance, it is easy to see how at one point ex-Catholics made up the second-largest religious demographic in the U.S.

In a recent U.S. Catholic article, Don Clemmer explores how understandings of identity, particularly for LGBTQ+ Catholics, play a role in this exodus. An insistence on a rigid definition of what makes a person Catholic has caused alienation and marginalization in what claims to be a unified church.

Stapleton Smith attended Catholic schools her whole life and took a job as a high school campus minister after college. She left after only one year, however, for fear of losing her job if her queer identity were discovered, as she often saw happening at other Catholic schools across the country. “I grew more and more terrified of what it would mean if knowledge of my lesbian identity got into the hands of the wrong person,” she explained.

As she slowly worked through the shame of her early years, Stapleton Smith attended divinity school, met and married her wife, and was ordained an Episcopal priest. She also found others with similarly painful encounters in the Roman Catholic Church.

“I began to have at this time so many experiences of how many former Roman Catholics come to the Episcopal Church, and they are so angry and hurt,” she remembered. “That anger and hurt deeply damage…them and their relationships with God, other people, and themselves.”

Michael Sennett is the director of communications and coordinator of social justice programming at St. Ignatius of Loyola Church in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts and a blogger for Bondings 2.0. “Every parish is seeing it,” he notes, “people willing to put down their foot and say, ‘I’m done.’”

Church leadership also seems to be noticing the trend with Pope Francis’ call for global listening via the synodal process and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ attempts at a Eucharistic revival. “Beneath the surface of each initiative are foundational questions,” Clemmer suggests in his article, “about who gets to call themselves Catholic, who gets to call anything Catholic, and who even wants to be called Catholic.”

This concern for Catholic identity–and who is in and who is out–matters tremendously, argues Clemmer:

“When a church–or any group–seeks a strident sense of identity for itself, the members who feel it most are people whose identities place them at the outermost edges. Those people are also most vulnerable to the aggression of other members who police those edges.”

In such a polarized environment, many younger people choose to leave, a generational difference noted by Brian Flanagan, a theologian at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia and New Ways Ministry board member. Gay Catholics of his generation, for example, generally chose to stay and create space within the institutional church. But many younger people don’t see the value of remaining, as he explains:

“‘Very few students don’t have friends who identify as LGBTQ. That’s the issue that makes them not even consider the Catholic Church…It feels to them kind of incomprehensible as to why the Catholic Church would even be thinking this way.'”

In fact, many younger Catholics harbor what Flanagan calls “deep suspicion of religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular.”

MT Dávila, the chair of religious and theological studies at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, agrees. “They’ve experienced real religious harm,” she acknowledged. And perhaps not surprisingly, “students who come to a Catholic college don’t always arrive linking the public role of the Catholic Church in the United States with an agent of solidarity and justice for oppressed groups.” As they learn about the Latin American church or the life of Dorothy Day, for example, she says some see “how the Catholic Church can be a space of solidarity and radical welcome.”

Stapleton Smith understands this tension: “Not always, but often, some of the ideals and teachings in the Roman Catholic Church that cause the most harm also have the potential to bring about the most healing and the greatest transformation.” Even as she now serves a different denomination, she characterizes herself as “in this space of wanting the Catholic Church to grow into the fullness of the church that it can be…I’m tilling a plot of land right next to yours.”

Dávila also sees the possibility of Catholic ideals. “There’s a point at which that scrutiny and purity culture crosses a line into not being Catholic anymore, not sustaining principles of Catholic social teaching on human dignity and racial justice,” she says, referring to church leaders demanding removals of rainbow flags as an example. Purity as a value falls beneath both charity and human dignity, she explains, adding “I don’t see a way for me to be doctrinally pure without being violent to another human being. It’s a very dangerous claim..My faithfulness calls my place to be in the mess, in the gray area…My place is much more clearly with the suffering than with the not.”

“The church is much wider, more expansive” than identity politics, reminds Sennett. “We also have to do our part in reclaiming what the church is, what it means, what the community is.” But he sees hope for the future, particularly among fellow queer Catholics: “People are finding so many ways to keep belonging and keep their faith alive and persisting, even when they’re feeling hurt or attacked or they’re being told they don’t belong.” He continues to reject understandings of Catholic identity that would require people to deny parts of their full selves: “It’s not new for queer people to reconcile their faith and their identity. They don’t have to apologize for it and find some way to belong. Because we just belong.”

—Angela Howard McParland (she/her), New Ways Ministry, February 24, 2023