New Common Ground for Catholic Conversations about Sexuality?
The Occupy movement has made me proud to be a Catholic. My colleagues in the Catholic theological world have been eager to express their support for the movement, and my friends in the Occupy camps are lifting up Catholics like Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan as role models. And really, this should be unsurprising in light of the denomination’s long history of economic critique and support for labor issues.
However, as a theologian focusing on issues of sexuality and gender, I am always—always—surprised to see American Catholics unite around an issue. The fact is, sexuality and gender might be the most divisive theological issues in the Catholic church of today’s Western world. This was evident at Fordham’s recent “More than a Monologue” conference on sexual diversity in Catholicism, where almost half the audience questions concerned how one might go about being Catholic while possessing this or that position on sexuality. It showed that we widely acknowledge sexuality as an authorizing discourse that delineates the Catholics from the non- or post- Catholics; today, one’s relation to sexuality directly implicates one’s relation to the church.
Regularly experiencing the divisions of American Catholicism through my work on sexuality, I have been wondering: Why does Occupy Wall Street generate such unified enthusiasm, while theological talk about sexuality quickly becomes a conversation stopper in the ecclesial and theological spheres of American Catholicism? And, if theological treatments of sexuality are presently constituted as divisive, can the unity we find in Catholic conversations about Occupy Wall St. serve as an alternative, constructive, and potentially less divisive starting point for conversations about sexuality in the American Catholic church?
Why not? Economics and sexuality are invariably intertwined. One of my favorite theologians, the late Marcella Althaus-Reid, called liberation theology to consider the reality of sexual embodiment in the lived experiences of the poor and challenged us to consider how sexuality—especially heteronormativity—underlies the structures of oppression that render people to poverty. What if we took her critique to the Occupy camps? To the pulpit? To the press? Might we find new common ground for thinking theologically about sexuality today?
Jessica Coblentz is a PhD student in Systematic Theology at Boston College.
Great post, Jess, but I question whether the Catholic conversations on economics are as unified as you claim. After all, economically conservative Catholics constantly cite influential Catholic neocons like George Weigel, Robert Sirico, and Michael Novak, who believe that Roman Catholic teachings support economic libertarianism AND conservative sexual stances.
Justin, you are very right. I should qualify this unity that I observe in the Catholic response to the Occupy Movement–for surely, we can not find any perfect “unity” among such a large denomination. Still, I will continue to insist that, compared to sexuality, this theological issue appears to be much less divisive. And I would argue that the divisions we have in the community around economics bear a very different weight than divisions about sexuality: people are not so quick to ask whether they should consider themselves Catholic or not when they realize that their economic beliefs digress from other Catholics, or official church doctrine. As such, I thinking starting with a theological conversation about economics may be an entrance into productive theological work on sexuality–even as economics is not a wholly unifying issue, as you are very right to point out. Thanks!