Love Means More…Or Less

Today’s post is from guest contributor Mary M. Doyle Roche, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, where she teaches courses in Christian ethics. Mary also helps to coordinate Outfront, the LGBTQIA+ alliance for faculty and staff at Holy Cross.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has renewed its Marriage: Unique for a Reason campaign under the banner Love Means More with a slick, interactive, and graphically appealing website. Many people might see themselves represented in the choice of photographic images for the website (diverse families in terms of race and ethnicity, images of men embracing, images of women embracing, images of children and young people). But the new cover opens on to the same old book – and it isn’t the gospel!

The initiative is framed as an intervention during polarizing times when it seems that so many people have lost (or never developed) the skills to disagree in good faith about matters of importance. According to the press release announcing the launch in February 2024, the Love Means More initiative is the result of wide consultation with bishops, pastors, educators, medical and mental health professionals, and lay Catholic leaders involved with family life ministry. The bishops claim to have heard the questions and concerns of “LGBT-identifying individuals,” but there is little evidence of authentic listening and engagement in the content.

In Love Means More, the bishops say they are dismayed when people who agree with the Church’s conclusions on political matters (like legislation prohibiting no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and reproductive rights) do so out of virulent homophobia, patriarchy, misogyny, and racism—all of which the bishops say they abhor. Rather than respond to their unease as an invitation to look critically at whether homophobia, racism, or misogyny might also be driving forces among some Christians, the bishops stubbornly set out to reassure people of faith who advocate for homophobic, racist, or misogynist policies that they are not really homophobic, racist, or misogynist.

The website’s supposed “dialogue” amounts to a question-and-answer format a la the scholastic style: question, answer, objections, and replies to objections. Most of the references lead back to familiar church documents and papal pronouncements. In a section that addresses whether marriage is a “real union” or merely a “social contract,” the bishops use blatant scare tactics in citing research demonstrating that husbands are more likely to leave wives who receive a serious diagnosis than wives are to leave husbands in the same situation. It seems that the bishops did not consult the countless same-sex and queer couples and families joined in civil unions who have cared for the gravely ill and accompanied loved ones in dying and grieving – and had to fight relentlessly for the right to do so with no support from the hierarchy.

The site actually mentions major figures in feminist theory like Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir, though there are no notes to direct the reader to their contributions, and their arguments are summarily dispatched. Rather than leaning into ambiguity or the tensions that exist as we learn more about sex and gender through experience and research, or engaging theories that have helped us to think critically and creatively, the site simply frames the tensions as incoherence.  The bishops are unable or unwilling to acknowledge that serious theoretical wrestling with concepts of gender have indeed provided foundation and impetus to challenge gender-based abuse, exploitation, manipulation, and violence, which were long tolerated by the hierarchy and that the bishops’ ignorance makes them unlikely to seriously address these. It is as if the bishops believe that advocating for the dignity of women and LGBTQIA+ persons has rolled in on wheels of inevitability without critical thought and impassioned advocacy.

The Love Means More initiative is much less about having fruitful conversation about love and life, intimacy and commitment, than it is about providing simplistic answers to complex questions and pat refutations of people’s experiences when they do not conform to Church teaching. The cases or vignettes provided come across as feigning pastoral concern, reiterating foregone conclusions. These stories do not contain the complexity and nuance of people’s experiences. The bishops do call for mercy, accompaniment, and a more compassionate pastoral approach, but the goal is always to repeat and reaffirm the teaching.

What we need, and what I have heard LGBTQIA+ folx ask for again and again, is a practice of deep and transformative listening in the Church. Love does indeed “mean more” and there are so many opportunities to experience what that “more” might be, to experience grace, if we listen and learn together rather than click our way through a site that hopes we’ll all be satisfied with less.

—Mary M. Doyle Roche, April 19, 2024