The Samaritan Woman, LGBTQ+ People, and the Synod

Bondings 2.0 writers Robert Shine and Francis DeBernardo are in Rome for the month of October covering the first global assembly of the Synod on Synodality, particularly LGBTQ-related developments. For the blog’s full coverage of this multi-year synodal journey, click here.

REPORTING FROM ROME—This week, the Synod assembly has been focusing on the theme of communion. The working document of the Synod, known as the Instrumentum Laboris, focused the theme of communion around a particular question: “A communion that radiates: How can we be more fully a sign and instrument of union with God and of the unity of all humanity?”

Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, OP, one of two spiritual assistants to the assembly, offered a scriptural reflection on the story of the Samaritan woman at the well found in John’s Gospel, as a way to introduce this topic of communion.

Fr. Radcliffe has long been known as a friend to the LGBTQ+ community, so it is interesting that he chose this gospel passage to preach on. The story has often been thought of as particularly meaningful to LGBTQ+ Christians since it is about Jesus foregoing cultural prejudices and dialoguing with a person whose sexuality has been castigated. Radcliffe’s “unpacking” of this story, though, also highlighted other themes that resonate with LGBTQ+ Catholics, particularly themes of marginalization, radical welcome, honoring differences, and accepting diversity.

The Dominican preacher focused first on the woman being “alone, a solitary figure” at the well, but by the end of the story “she is transformed into the first preacher of the gospel.” The outcast becomes the leader. The last becomes first. And in fact, she is considered the first person to spread the Gospel, even before the Apostles did.

Radcliffe then develops the theme of thirst, noting that the gospel story focuses around a well, signifying a desire for water. And thirst here is good; it is not just a deprivation of liquid, but a yearning for something necessary for life:

“She learns to become thirsty too. First of all for water, so that she need not come to the well every day. Then she discovers a deeper thirst. Until now she has gone from man to man. Now she discovers the one for whom she had always been longing without knowing it. As Romano the Melodist said, often people’s erratic sex life is a fumbling after their deepest thirst: for God. Our sins, our failures, are usually mistaken attempts to find what we most desire. But the Lord is waiting patiently for us by our wells, inviting us to thirst for more.”

In short: “. . .[F]ormation for ‘a communion which radiates,’ is learning to thirst and hunger ever more deeply. . . . So our formation for synodality means learning to become passionate people, filled with deep desire.”

LGBTQ+ Catholics know this yearning all too well through the experience of waiting “like a dry weary land without water” for decades for the institutional church to acknowledge, accept, and affirm them fully. Often this yearning is seen as a problem, as an absence (and on one level, it is that), however Radcliffe shows that this desire and thirst is a necessary part of the spiritual life, as well as a necessary part of church reform.

LGBTQ+ Catholics have called on church leaders for decades to dialogue with them and to get to know them personally. Radcliffe explained that to become passionate people, all of us in the church (that includes its leaders) must become people ready to encounter one another, even if we disagree with one another:

“We should be formed for deeply personal encounters with each other, in which we transcend easy labels. Love is personal and hatred is abstract. I quote again from Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, ‘Hate was just a failure of imagination.’ St Paul’s very personal disagreement with St Peter was hard but truly an encounter. The Holy See is founded on this passionate, angry but real encounter. The people whom St. Paul could not abide were the underhand spies, who gossiped and worked secretly, whispering in the corridors, hiding who they were with deceitful smiles. Open disagreement was not the problem.”

Radcliffe illustrated this point by ticking off a list of people who have sometimes been marginalized in the church–and he did so with his characteristic dry, British humor:

“So many people feel excluded or marginalised in our Church because we have slapped abstract labels on them: divorced and remarried, gay people, polygamous people, refugees, Africans, Jesuits! A friend said to me the other day: ‘I hate labels. I hate people being put in boxes. I cannot abide these conservatives.’”

The conclusion of the homily offers a reflection about how in meeting Christ, we meet our true selves, and we are liberated to go and share our selves with others. Radcliffe’s description sounds an awful lot like the coming out process:

“The foundation of our loving but unpossessive encounter with each other is surely our encounter with the Lord, each at our own well, with our failures and weakness and desires. He knows us as we are and sets us free to encounter each other with a love that liberates and does not control. In the silence of prayer, we are liberated.

“She meets the one who knows her totally. This impels her on her mission. ‘Come and see the man who told me everything that I have ever done.’ Until now she has lived in shame and concealment, fearing the judgment of her fellow citizens. She goes to the well in the midday heat when no one else will be there. But now the Lord has shone the light on all that she is and loves her. After the Fall, Adam and Eve hide from the sight of God, ashamed. Now she steps into the light. Formation for synodality peels away our disguises and our masks, so that we step into the light. May this happen in our circuli minori! [The Italian words for the synod’s ‘small groups.’]

“Then we shall be able to mediate God’s unpossessive pleasure in every one of us, in which there is no shame.”

Was Radcliffe using coded language to describe LGBTQ+ experience? I don’t think so. I think that if he wanted to make a point about LGBTQ+ people, he would have done so much more plainly.

However, I do think that Radcliffe, consciously or unconsciously, has identified many of the traits of some LGBTQ+ spiritual experiences, and he shows how these spiritual gifts can be used for the good of the entire church, especially in this synodal process. If the synod participants take up his challenge, I believe this meeting can produce some very good results.

—Francis DeBernardo, New Ways Ministry, October 12, 2023