Faith As a Threshold: Bodies, Gender, Theology

Selene Zorzi is an Italian Catholic theologian who took part in the online meeting “The Practice of the Threshold and the Relationship Between Body and Faith,” organized by Vite Nuove (New Lives), a national network of Christian parents of children with gender variance, supportedLa Tenda di Gionata, an Italian Catholic LGBTQ+ organization.

Dr. Zorzi’s research specializes in spiritual theology, theological anthropology, and patrology. She holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Rome Tor Vergata, a bachelor’s degree in Theology and a doctorate in History of Theology from the Pontifical Athenaeum of Sant’Anselmo, Rome. She has taught in various pontifical universities and is a member of the Coordination of Italian Theologians.

Bondings 2.0’s Elisa Belotti interviewed Zorzi to explore more deeply her topics for the meeting: the relationship between faith and the body, as well as what the experiences of people at the margins of the Church, particularly trans people, can contribute to Catholic theology.

EB: In your talk, you proposed the image of the threshold as a place of passage, encounter, and transformation. Why do you consider this such an important lens through which to understand the Catholic faith today, especially for people, such as the LGBTQ+ community, who are on the margins of the Church?

Selene Zorzi

SZ: The threshold is a powerful image: it recurs today in many proposals for reflection, and I consider it a sign of the times. The threshold is neither inside nor outside; it is the place where we understand that any discourse on identity that claims to be absolute reaches a cul-de-sac, just as a room without a door would. It is the place where encounter becomes possible precisely because neither side claims to possess the whole truth. 

We have an absolute need for thresholds, or else everything becomes a prison. In the biblical tradition, thresholds are theologically rich places: the tent of Abraham open to the three strangers, the doorposts sprinkled with blood in Exodus, Christ as the door in the Gospel, all places of passage where God makes Godself present precisely through the crossing.

I strongly believe that the structure of spiritual life is progress, growth, development, crossing, passage. The threshold is another name for Easter.

For the Catholic faith today, this image becomes crucial because the Church has placed many people on the margins: women, LGBTQ+ people, but also those who are uncertain, doubtful, restless, agnostic, or perplexed seekers. The threshold instead allows us to rethink their position. Enough with anathemas and definitive exclusions! 

The threshold position can, paradoxically, become the most fruitful point from which to rethink the community as a whole. Those who live on the threshold, often because they have been pushed there, nevertheless possess a perspective that those at the center cannot have. Taking the threshold seriously means to stop thinking of faith as a territory to be defended, or of the Church as a fortress on a hill, and beginning to think of faith as a practice of encounter that is renewed and enriched every time someone knocks and of the Church, which should be ahome that welcomes those who are at the door.

EB: You remind us that Christianity is a deeply embodied religion, yet the tradition has often developed a “disembodied” theology, or at least one that has struggled to engage with sexuality and gender identity. How did this distance come about? And where should a theology that wants to take the body seriously start from today?

SZ: I believe that Christianity is, among all religions, the one that takes embodiment most seriously. It begins with a scandalously bodily event: a God who becomes flesh, who is born, eats, sweats, suffers, and dies. The resurrection, too, is an affirmation about the destiny of the body. And yet much of Western theology has removed the body, treating it as a problem to be disciplined rather than as a place of revelation. 

“The Creation of Adam” by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, Vatican Ciry

This distance developed through centuries of thought that privileged the soul over the body, reason over perception, order over desire: an inheritance that certainly has its roots in Greek philosophy, but also in later theological choices–which have been, allow me to say, from a “male” perspective–that associated the body and sexuality with sin rather than grace. A reflection that seems to begin from those who feel uncomfortable inhabiting their own bodies, and from those who understand sexuality primarily in predatory terms.

Of course, reflection on gender identity is a recent issue, absent from the ancient mindset and therefore also from the Bible. But despite the fact that the core of faith centers on the body, Catholic theology still struggles to speak about incarnation except in the abstract, without engaging with real bodies, with playful sexuality, and with gender identity– in other words, with the concrete experience of inhabiting a body that does not always correspond to the categories that have been established. 

A theology that wants to take the body seriously should start precisely by listening to real experiences, including those of bodies that tradition has ignored or condemned.This theology would recover incarnation as a daily practice of attentiveness and closeness to people and their lived experiences, which are always embodied and sexed. Such an approach would demonstrate that wetruly believe the body is the place where God continues to make Godself present.

EB: In ecclesial debates, trans people are often presented as a challenge to theology. You, however, suggest that they can offer something valuable to our very understanding of faith. What can the Church learn by listening to the experiences of trans people?

SZ: Catholic theology has always proclaimed the inseparable unity of body and spirit, to the point that it even accepts medical intervention on intersex people with a view to restoring coherence to that unity. Yet when it comes to a gender identity that does not coincide with the body one was given, that same unity is denied. This is an inconsistency that theology must have the courage to acknowledge.

“Open Door” by Henri Matisse

Trans people, in fact, often experience in a conscious and reflective way something that concerns all of us, but that most people are never forced to question: the relationship between the body we inhabit, the identity we feel we have, and the categories that society–and the Church–assign to us from the outside. None of us is exempt from this question of this kind. Women have experienced it and reflected on it more than men, but men are not immune to it either. Precisely because of the model of masculinity that society puts forward for men, this expectationn becomes, for many men–not only gay men–  prison.

There is also the broader experience of a gap between the self and the body which is common to everyone and which we experience in sport, illness, growth, recovery, and dieting(!)–any timewe experience a body that does not fully respond to us. Trans people experience this gap in a particularly conscious way, and this enables them to tell theology something that the “peaceful” experience of those who have never had to question themselves cannot say: that the identity of the self and harmony with our body are not something acquired once and for all, but a journey, a continual crossing.

If we take Genesis seriously, where human beings are created in the image of God before binary categories of gender are established, then the trans experience can help us understand that identity is never simply something given once and for all, but a process, a continual becoming, which is also how the Catholic tradition has always understood spiritual life: as a permanent process of conversion. The great biblical figures of faith are always on the frontier: Abraham who journeys, Moses who crosses the boundary without entering the Promised Land, Ruth the foreigner who becomes the mother of Israel, Jesus with his changing body (transfigured, disfigured, resurrected in a new form), to name just a few. 

Faith itself is transition, a movement out of oneself toward otherness. The Trinity’s divine persons themselves have an identity constituted by being in relationship with each other.

I think the Church has much to learn, if only it were willing to listen instead of limiting itself to judging. Listening to trans people means learning once again to think of faith as an open journey, made up of thresholds that must continually be crossed. 

Trans people are not a problem to be solved, but members who add to the Body of Christ what theology conceived from the center has not yet been able to say. They are part of the experience of the Church, and they enrich it.

—Elisa Belotti, New Ways Ministry, August 17, 2026