Catholic Imagination Must Be Queered with Curiosity, Argues Writer

Theodore McCombs

An author who writes science fiction/fantasy stories has said that the Vatican’s two most recent declarations on LGBTQ+ issues has called for a queering of the Catholic imaginary through curiosity and self-discovery.

In a comprehensive article for The Baffler, Theodore McCombs examines the ways that Fiducia Supplicans (which gave permission to bless people in same-gender relationships) and Dignitas Infinita (which took a negative view of gender transitions), when taken together, seem to simultaneously expand, limit, complicate, and problematize the church’s positions on queer lives and queer experiences.

Same-gender couples may be granted spontaneous blessings–a move McCombs deems “extraordinary,” particularly when considered against the church’s history–yet the Vatican insists that this is no way should be taken as an acceptance of same-gender sexual activity or marriages. When this document is coupled with Dignitas Infinita’s condemnation of “gender theory” and “sex change,” what emerges is a confusing and oftentimes contradictory view of the church’s approach to LGBTQ+ individuals.

For McCombs, the church’s discomfort with bodily realities is a primary cause of  this tension. He writes:

“…the more basic way to reconcile these two documents is to recognize that for the Church, bodies have always been the sticking point…The Pope supports legal recognition of [same-gender] couple’s love but not bodily recognition. Gay men in seminaries can be tolerated, but no ‘frociaggine,’ please. And sex change, as a physical gender transgression, is a ‘grave violation’ of human dignity.”

McCombs argues, our bodily realities must be taken into account because we are, after all, the Body of Christ. If it is a mystical body that serves as one of the primary metaphors for our existence as community, then we cannot fail to attend to the bodies that make up the one Body, and this includes queer bodies. McCombs asks, “If all members of the mystical Body of Christ contribute a charism, [then] what might the queer charism be?”

McCombs identifies several possibilities for the queer charism including a “radical extension of the family” demonstrated through LGBTQ+ people’s ability to form and sustain chosen family and serve their communities through mutual aid. Another possibility, exemplified through the work of an order of drag nuns, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, may be the playfulness inherent in transgressing boundaries. He writes:

“Irreverence could be one of the gifts LGBTQ Catholics offer the Church—as critique, as a corrective against pompousness and cheerlessness, as a leaven of joy in a religion that often seems to fetishize guilt and pain. If the terms of Church welcome are a queer respectability politic, however, integration along the Pope’s vision will fail disastrously. For queer Catholics, an acceptance conditioned on self-censorship and concealment simply rebuilds the closet. For the Church, bowdlerized integration obscures the real value that outsiders offer majorities when difference is seen as not just tolerable but invigorating.”

Irreverence as gift involves a wrestling, an eagerness to understand, and an encounter with what otherwise might be rejected outright. This phenomenon is not a foreign idea to Catholicism. As Francis DeBernardo, New Ways Ministry’s executive director, explained to McCombs, “What separates Catholicism from other Christian denominations is that it is incarnational and sacramental.” In other words, the Catholic Church is built upon the concepts of recognizing God incarnate in the tangible realities of this world and appreciating the sanctity within symbols. It is through interacting with the concrete, lived, bodily experiences of the world–however strange or unfamiliar they may be– that we come to an awareness of God’s presence and action therein.

This, for McCombs, points to how the church ought to interact with LGBTQ+ people (who are part of its Body) and likewise speaks to the gifts which LGBTQ+ Catholics exemplify: curiosity and self-discovery. According to McCombs:

“If the Vatican’s theologians were more curious, the evidence of created queer truths, prior to experience but which must be discovered through experience, might intrigue them. Doesn’t infinite dignity call for inexhaustible curiosity? Doesn’t being naturae rationabilis individua substantia (an ‘individual substance of a rational nature’) by its very terms compel exploration and experiment? For the Pope’s vision of pastoral integration to succeed, the Body must be interested in itself. More than compassion, more than welcome: only a Church that is prepared to find itself enriched by the encounter with creation’s diversity can call itself catholic.”

—Phoebe Carstens (they/them), New Ways Ministry, December 18, 2024