Gay Catholic Shares Life Experiences with Theologians

Luigi Pollastro

Re-Existing: the Spirit Connecting the Peripheries is a global conference on the theology of the margins held at the Western Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITSEO) ,the Jesuit university in Guadalajara, Mexico. People of faith from different continents gathered in September to center the voices of those who resist economic coercion and cultural dominance and who re-exist at the peripheries of society, culture and the churches, while theologians listened in a posture of reception rather than instruction.

Bondings 2.0’s Elisa Belotti interviewed Luigi Pollastro, a queer Catholic member of the Italian LGBTQ+ Christian group Giovani del Guado (Youth of the Crossing), who took part in the event. In the following conversation, Pollastro reflects on what happens when the margins are treated not as problems but as sources of revelation, capable of reshaping theological imagination and exposing how power and exclusion operate within church life.

How did you come to be part of Re-Existing?

I was invited by Teresa Forcades – a Benedictine nun, physician, political activist and queer theologian – who served on the organizing board. I attended as a representative of Giovani del Guado , an Italian Catholic LGBTQ+ group based in Milan. The planning board consisted of six theologians from different regions of the world. In addition to Forcades, the team included:

• Kochurani Abraham, feminist theologian from India;

• Mumbi Kigutha, a Nigerian lay religious, currently doing doctoral work in Washington D.C. on spiritual abuse in Catholic institutions in Africa;

• Juan Carlos La Puente Tapia, member of the Oregon Synod for the intercultural and the interreligious mission;

• Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez, Dominican theologian from Mexico working in decolonial theology;

• Alberto Elías González Gómez, philosopher and theologian.

It was a conference on the theology of the margins, but with a groundbreaking starting point: begin from people’s lives, placing those at the margins at the center. The theologians did not present academic papers. Instead, they took on a posture of listening and service to associations and collectives from around the world who live at the margins and offered their lived experience for the benefit of all. We, the peripheries, were put at the center, listened to, and treated as valuable sources of insight.

The atmosphere was ecumenical and deeply spiritual. Although we were in a Catholic setting in Central America, there was a natural openness to rituals from shamanic, Malaysian, and First Nations traditions alongside practices from other spiritual paths.  Muslim, Sufi and atheist participants belonging to communities of social resistance and leaders of native spiritual traditions also were present.

Each morning began with an opening ritual: first led by a Malaysian shamanic practitioner, then by Cecilia Firethunder and Nick Hernandez of the Lakota people of South Dakota, followed by silent meditation. After that, participants reflected in turn on the day’s question. At the session’s close, the two theologians offered a synthesis, highlighting points of resonance and divergence.

Which themes shaped the conference? How were the days structured?

The conference lasted five days, from September 22nd to 26th. It opened on Monday the 22nd with a public ceremony that included institutional greetings and a presentation of the project. It was also open to all students and local residents of Guadalajara.

Each of the three days was devoted to explore a different themen:

• Awakening: when in your life did you experience a moment of awakening, a call toward something radical and larger than yourself?

• Healing: which steps led you toward healing, and how did that reshape your sense of self and your community?

• Embodying. How do you embody the margin and how does embodiment itself confront structures of power?

We visited also El Salto de Vita, a nearby collective in the town of Salto. The collective resists environmental devastation caused by multinational industries operating there since the 1950s. What used to be a fertile ecosystem has been turned into a polluted swamp. The smell was so strong that masks were necessary. While the government celebrates industrial expansion as economic progress, the environmental and human cost is catastrophic.

Afternoons focused on bodily practices: workshops in movement, singing, and dance, along with two performances. Each day ended with a moment of recollection and a spiritual closing ritual. Every participant brought their humanity and a life oriented by faith. For me, it was a profoundly sacred moment. I felt as though I were in heaven: each person carried into the circle a full spectrum of human experience: joy, sorrow, waiting, wounds and desire.

How was your experience as an LGBTQ+ Catholic welcomed? What did you bring to the conference and what did you take home?

I represented the Catholic LGBTQ+ group Giovani del Guado, but of course I also brought my own experience as a queer Catholic person. That identity is itself a way of inhabiting the edges of both Church and society. And there is life there: peripheries are generative places. Democracy is not measured by the victory of the majority, but by how a society treats those who don’t agree and do not conform. For that reason, the margins are the most truthful place to test the health of both society and Church.

Starting from a queer point of view allows us to expose dynamics of power and exclusion in the Church. The issue for the Church is not only homosexuality. The deeper unresolved issue is sexuality itself. Many people inside the hierarchy arrive at celibacy or chastity without ever having developed the tools to understand and integrate desire. And when desire is not understood, it often turns into distortions.

Placing a marginalized identity at the center helps everyone. If I speak from my reality as a gay man and I am recognized in my dignity, then long-held teachings – like the idea of complementarity or fertility in marriage – come under new scrutiny. Asking what desire, consent, pleasure and respect mean is not only good for queer people. It is good for the whole community.

At the same time, I received a great deal. In my English-speaking circle there was Nick, a Lakota person who founded an agricultural project rooted in First Nations spiritual practice. For me, a European from a country that was never colonized, where faith almost always means Catholicism, listening to those stories was essential. They broaden my horizon.

What we experienced was real unity, not homogenization. Everyone remained who they were, with all their specificity. And in that plurality, I could recognize a part of myself or discover a new one.