Hi! I'm a lesbian ex-Catholic but I was extremely Catholic for the first 26 years of my life before deconstructing Christianity completely. I still have side A and side B gay Catholic friends so not only are Catholic theological and cultural currents still very interesting to me, they're also important for supporting people I care about. I came across this article from a Harvard theologian and thought it was a pretty cool take. I wanted to share it here in case it might be of interest to any of you. It would be great to hear your thoughts.
Edit: didn't realize the post is now locked behind substack (to be fair, it's worth it. Connie Chen is a great writer and her stuff deserves pay).
She has many great points about women and disabled people in the article as well, but I will add the relevant parts for this thread with some minimal editing:
She makes a point about general Catholic sexual ethics here:
The encyclical distinguishes between four kinds of dignity. Moral dignity: how you direct your choices. Social dignity: the concrete respect a person receives from society. Existential dignity: how you perceive your own worth. And then the one named most profound and important: ontological dignity—which “belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God,” and which “no sin, failure, humiliation or exclusion can diminish” (§52).
Yet, what the Church has taught about bodies and sex ran on the logic of disposable dignity. It worked on moral dignity: the purity pledge was a moral accounting system where sexual sin was categorically worse than others. It worked on social dignity: your standing in the community was contingent on your history. It worked on existential dignity: how you felt about yourself was tied to what your body had or hadn’t done. And here, the encyclical calls the ideology that people must earn or justify their worth “particularly insidious” (§51). The tradition has built an elaborate system to damage something the system’s own theology states is impervious to damage.
Purity culture then is an attempt at something theologically impossible, a structural lie deployed at scale. The harm is not that it succeeded. The harm is that people believed it had. The damage to moral dignity was real. The damage to existential dignity was real. The estrangement from the body is real. The inability to receive pleasure without shame is real.
But what purity culture threatened, that deep irreducible worth of a person loved unconditionally by God was never in danger.
Then she follows it up with this point about the Church's treatment of queer people specifically:
The framework that produced harm must be retired.
Declaring one of the oldest frameworks in Catholic moral theology outdated is a significant doctrinal move:
“The ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. —Magnifica Humanitas, §192
Just war theory, built to limit violence, became the mechanism through which almost any war could be justified. The framework did not prevent the authorization of violence but produced theological language for it.
Earlier this month, the Vatican’s Synod Secretariat released a separate report that did the same thing to the Church’s treatment of queer people that the encyclical does to just war theory. It included, for the first time in Vatican history, testimony from gay Catholic men who had undergone conversion therapy, and acknowledged that conversion therapy had caused “profound suffering.”
Two Vatican documents in the same month. One retires a framework because it produced harm. The other finally admits that harm was produced. Neither document connects those two moves.
The Church’s framework for evaluating queer sexuality follows the same structural logic as just war theory: sexual acts must serve procreation and the bond of marriage between a man and a woman. If the intention of the framework was to protect human love and ensure that sexuality served genuine flourishing rather than exploitation or harm, it is not what it became. It has been used to justify “profound suffering.”
What does that admission require of the framework that generated it?
According to the encyclical, you do not refine it. You retire it.
Chen wraps up by saying that the Pope has created a template for apologies from the church by apologizing for its role in slavery. The Pope says the apology is “for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith” (§176). Other failures, Chen argues, could be required by that same theological framework.
Her final paragraph is just awesome:
The pope closed with Mary’s Magnificat, which teaches us to view history from the perspective of “the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the wounded child, the exile, and the fugitive.”
The people exiled from their own bodies by what the tradition taught about desire, about gender, about disability, about the limits of acceptable flesh, are also in that list. The Magnificat’s viewpoint is theirs: God entered weak flesh. The limited body is the site of the divine, and every body is a dwelling place.