New Book, “Remaking Humanity,” Offers Critique of Papal Teachings on Gender

Adam Beyt

The following is an interview between theologian Adam Beyt and Brian Flanagan, New Ways Ministry’s Senior Fellow, about Beyt’s new book, Remaking Humanity: Embodiment and Hope in Catholic Theology. Beyt is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Norbert College, Wisconsin. For his previous contributions to Bondings 2.0, click here.

Brian Flanagan: Adam, it’s great to talk with you about your newly published book, . It’s a stunning work of theological scholarship, reading and re-reading scholars like Edward Schillebeeckx, M. Shawn Copeland, Judith Butler, and Thomas Aquinas, among many others. But since it’s a complicated, academic text, I wanted to ask some questions so that our readers can get a sense of why your work is important for moving the needle forward on LGBTQ+ issues in the Catholic Church. So one big first question: what, briefly and in layperson’s terms, is this book about?

Adam Beyt: Thanks so much for the kind introduction and offering the chance to talk about this work! Remaking Humanity explores how we can talk about bodies in a Catholic theological context without hurting people, a task I argue also necessitates the hope-filled work of building more just worlds for different kinds of humans.

Flanagan: That’s such an important task, and your book helps give some of the theoretical foundations for why Catholics not only can, but must, think, and talk about bodies differently. I know that your work here comes, in part, from your doctoral studies at Fordham University. Why did you choose to focus on this topic and these questions about human embodiment for your research?

Beyt: While I grew up going to local Catholic schools, I did not engage Catholic theology more robustly until I was an undergrad religious studies major at Northwestern University. That’s when I got to read some of the Church’s greatest thinkers, and like many Catholics, I came to treasure this rich intellectual heritage that had the capacity to speak to today’s contemporary injustices, like those concerning racism or immigration. Yet the Church’s authoritative teaching regarding gender, sex, and sexuality seemed so incoherent to me. All of this was also during my own coming-out process and navigating my sexuality as someone who is queer, specifically gay.

In grad school, I became interested in queer theory, a term famously difficult to define that, broadly understood, refers to critical reflections by and/or about the experiences of LGBTQ+ folks. When I went to graduate school, I became interested in theological anthropology, the subfield of theology focusing on what it means to be human. I realized “embodiment,” as a field of inquiry, offered a great terrain for exploring a potential theological solution to the frustration and intellectual dissatisfaction I first felt regarding the Church’s authoritative teaching on gender, sex, and sexuality.

Flanagan: You write that John Paul II, especially in“Theology of the Body,” his series of lectures about human sexuality, promotes an idea of gender, sex, and sexuality that defines gender as a static and binary reality that attempts to control how we think about gender and our own humanity. In your book, you criticize John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body,” his series of lectures about human sexuality. Can you tell us what you find harmful about this previous pope’s ideas for LGBTQ folks?

Beyt: To answer this question, I rely on the work of theologian Adrian Thatcher who helps to diagnose this problem. John Paul II makes a kind of natural law argument by asserting “truth claims” about human bodies. He understands human bodies as being relational and sexually dimorphic. This latter term means human bodies can only exist as what many would label as cisgender women and cisgender men. Women and men, in his view, are meant to “complete” each other in the sacrament of matrimony, becoming “co-creators” through their unity and openness to the generation of life. But John Paul’s “truth claims” come from faulty and inconsistent models of human bodies in relation to sex and gender. The pope assumes that the “truth” about human bodies are the cultural ideas and the limited models for humanity that formed him as he grew-up in 20th century Europe.

Under this model of the human person, any non-conforming gender expression, bodily change (such as gender-affirming care for transgender people), or non-procreative sexual activity deviates from this account of “truth” and denies genuine human freedom.

Flanagan: How much do you think John Paul II’s ideas about gender are similar to, or different from, Pope Francis’ thoughts on what he calls “gender ideology”?

Beyt: In content, John Paul II and Francis have the same views about gender. In style, Francis offers a much greater openness and receptivity towards queer people when encountering them, especially in person. He does however, wield the term “gender ideology” as a kind of rhetorical cudgel, a catch-all phrase demarcating any deviation from the “truth” of the body argument I mentioned earlier. Judith Butler’s recent book, the one I reviewed for New Ways Ministry earlier this year, addresses this topic directly.

Flanagan: Your concrete proposal for how we could re-think and reimagine bodies in Catholic theology draws upon the scholars Schillebeeckx and Butler- what might that re-thinking and re-imagining might look like in concrete practices or ideas?

Beyt: Both Schillebeeckx and Butler help us affirm that the terms we use to categorize and define certain kinds of bodies are always “provisional,” meaning that these “labels” are all we’ve got to use for now, in their limited utility for some folks. New understandings can and will continue to develop. I always think it’s helpful to describe gender as a “local group project” in this regard.

I believe that God’s grace recreates us to become something greater and more expansive as humans than we can possibly imagine. A brief glance at the astonishing variety of ways of being human found in the lives of saints will affirm this. Saint Francis of Assisi lived a life of radical poverty and love of all creation. Thomas Aquinas revolutionized Catholic theology. Catherine of Sienna prophetically demanded unity amid Church division. Flora Tang has a great essay about this topic specifically for queer people. I thus encourage others to embrace a similar kind of openness for new, decidedly queer/ transformative ways of affirming the newness of life offered by Christ’s Gospel.

In more Catholic pastoral terms, I think this idea helps enrich reflections on terms like “discernment” and “vocation.” It invites us to accompany those of us whose gender and embodied experiences exceed the limits of our current accepted understandings of gender and sexuality. Our church can help them go through their process of discerning their vocations.

Flanagan: As an ecclesiologist, someone who studies the structures and governance of the church, I paid particular attention to what you have termed “assemblies of hope” which you describe as “communities that act as anticipatory signs of the Reign of God by dismantling necropolitics.” You use that last term to describe how communities are built to harm or kill certain kinds of bodies, hence the “necro” added to politics. Do you see any of those communities already existing or coming into being, either within the Catholic Church, or beyond?

Beyt: The example I use in my book is Out at Saint Paul, which is a famous LGBTQ+ Catholic parish ministry that many readers of New Ways Ministry are likely already know. Other organizations like DignityUSA or Outreach are also great examples. Of course, not every parish can exist in an LGBTQ+ epicenter and/or major American city like New York City nor can they have as many resources as a James Martin. I think these assemblies of hope can be found in communities in which their work is neither as visible nor as easy– the challenge of trying to anticipate a more loving world in a hostile parish or diocese. I think specifically of those living in the parts of the world in which visible LGBTQ+ affirming activity is punishable by law. Those folks are the ones doing the genuinely radical and transformative change of incarnating the new life worlds of God’s Reign within history.

Flanagan: Exactly. There’s so much work being done – especially by so many readers here at New Ways Ministry – to help bring that Reign of God into being. Thank you for your work in this book to help us all begin to imagine what communities that think about embodiment differently might look like.

—Brian Flanagan (he/him), New Ways Ministry, December 4, 2024