Is the Church a “Family”?

Today’s post is part of Bondings 2.0’s series of theological reflections on LGBTQ+ issues and the Synod on Synodality, which will be published as the General Assembly of the Synod meets at the Vatican this month. For all of Bondings 2.0’s Synod coverage, including reports from Rome, click here.

Today’s post is from Travis LaCouter, who is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at KU Leuven, where his research focuses on dissent and normative contestation in the Roman Catholic Church. He holds degrees from Oxford and Holy Cross, and his writing can be found in Commonweal, U.S. Catholic Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Earlier this month, during the Vatican’s pre-Synod retreat, Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, OP, offered a series of spiritual reflections touching on themes like “authority,” “hope,” and “friendship.” All of Radcliffe’s reflections (which are gathered here) are characteristically humane, challenging, and theologically rich—and they help illuminate the “spirituality for synodality” which is undoubtedly an essential aspect of the Church’s current journey.

In his second reflection, Fr. Radcliffe took up the image of “the Church as our home,” or as a kind of “family.” “Every living creature needs a home if it is to flourish,” Radcliffe said, “somewhere in which we are both accepted and challenged.” Families inevitably must navigate disagreements, Radcliffe said, but ultimately, “Home is where we are known, loved and safe […].” Similar language can be found throughout the Synod documents (e.g., see the Working Document, §29, 68, etc.) and in relevant commentary from the Catholic press. But it’s worth interrogating our use of this language, however intuitive it seems at first to be.

Of course, the language of church-as-family is not new, nor is it unique to the Catholic Church. In their classic 1980 work, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that we depend on metaphors to structure our everyday experience of reality: “An argument is like a war,” “Time is money,” “The body is a temple” — these and other metaphorical shortcuts help us compress, combine, and collate ideas so that we need not start thinking from scratch every time we open our mouths. In a subsequent study, Lakoff argued that the family metaphor in particular is crucial for how we conceive of our fundamental political divisions (with conservatives being drawn to “strict-father” archetypes and liberals preferring a “nurturant-parent” ideal).

But metaphors can be dangerous, too, in that they limit our imagination about what’s possible and paper over important aspects of the things they refer to. Thus Lakoff and Johnson warn that, “To operate only in terms of a consistent set of metaphors is to hide many aspects of reality.” This warning seems to apply to the Church’s language about itself as a “home” or “family.” This is because the Church is decidedly not always a place where we are “known, loved and safe”—nor for that matter is the family.

The status and dignity of LGBTQ persons has been a recurring topic at synodal gatherings the world over; so perhaps the experiences of such persons can help suggest some of the shortcomings of these “family” and “home” metaphors. To start with, as more than a decade of survey data show, LGBTQ youth are significantly overrepresented among young people experiencing homelessness. Moreover, according to a 2012 study by the Williams Institute, the most frequent reasons LGBTQ youth gave when asked to explain their homelessness had to do with being forced out of their homes or having to run away from home as a result of “family rejection” (which could include physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, as well financial or emotional neglect). And a 2014 report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) found that LGBTQ young adults who had previously faced family rejection were much more likely to attempt suicide, contract HIV, and grapple with substance abuse later on in life.

The point of this grim litany is to suggest that the metaphors of “home” and “family” cannot be innocently invoked by a Church that seeks to welcome LGBTQ people. Home can be a site of profound damage, and families can wound like no one else can. Tragically, many queer people today still must find their sense of acceptance and safety beyond the home, rather than in it. What can the Church be for those people? One hopes it looks like something radically different than what their families were able to provide.

At the very least, if it is to be like a family in a way that models and enacts God’s love in the world, then the Church will have to start by acknowledging the harm it has inflicted upon those who it has cast out, and work to transform that harm into healing. In the SAMHSA report cited above, an unaccepting mother of a gay child has this to say:

“When I put my head on the pillow at night, I think about my daughter and just hope she’s safe. I don’t know where she is. I haven’t heard from her since I threw her out of the house when she told me she was lesbian. I didn’t know what to do. I wish I had acted differently. I would give anything to be able to change that now.”

Can a synodal Church make the same confession?

Ultimately, the problem is not just that “the present Church does not seem to be a safe home” for many, as Radcliffe acknowledged in his reflection. It’s that the idea of “home” or “family” still fails to capture the type of community that the Church is truly called to be. As Nicolete Burbach argued on this blog recently, what the Church should strive towards is not simply queer “inclusion” but rather “liberation”—liberation from the system of sanction and “social punishments” that distinguishes between acceptable and unacceptable forms of life. It is the experience of many queer youth that the family is where such sanctions and punishments are first felt. The Church must therefore be able to imagine itself in terms that go beyond the “strict-father” vs. “permissive-parent” dichotomy; otherwise, we really are just conservative and liberal factions struggling for control of the ecclesial power-structure.

If, however, we are an eschatological community journeying together by grace towards an end that none of us fully understand nor control, then our faith cannot be reduced, in the end, to any adequate metaphor. The Synod is an opportunity to renew this pilgrim faith. But to do so we must refuse to compromise the transcendent possibilities of our hope in the One who “makes all things new” (Rev 21:5) including by remaking the Church into something new and more liberating than our limiting experiences of home and family.

—Travis LaCouter, October 27, 2023