More than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church

Voices of Our Times

J. Patrick Hornbeck II, Michael A. Norko, J. Patrick Hornbeck, II, Michael A. Norko

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780823257652
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

This volume, like its companion, Voices of Our Times, collects essays drawn from a series of public conferences held in autumn 2011 entitled "More than a Monologue." The series was the fruit of collaboration among four institutions of higher learning: two Catholic universities and two nondenominational divinity schools. The conferences aimed to raise awareness of and advance informed, compassionate, and dialogical conversation about issues of sexual diversity within the Catholic community, as well as in the broader civic worlds that the Catholic Church and Catholic people inhabit. They generated fresh, rich sets of scholarly and reflective contributions that promise to take forward the delicate work of theological-ethical and ecclesial development. Along with Voices of Our Times, this volume captures insights from the conferences and aims to foster what the Jesuit Superior General, Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, has called the "depth of thought and imagination" needed to engage effectively with complex realities, especially in areas marked by brokenness, pain, and the need for healing. The volumes will serve as vital resources for understanding and addressing better the too often fraught relations between LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) persons, their loved ones and allies, and the Catholic community.Inquiry, Thought, and Expression explores dimensions of ministry, ethics, theology, and law related to a range of LGBTQ concerns, including Catholic teaching, its reception among the faithful, and the Roman Catholic Church's significant role in world societies. Within the volume, a series of essays on ministry explores various
perspectives not frequently heard within the church. Marriage equality and the treatment of LGBTQ individuals by and within the Roman Catholic Church are considered from the vantage points of law, ethics, and theology. Themes of language and discourse are explored in analyses of the place of sexual diversity in church history, thought, and authority.The two volumes of More than a Monologue, like the conferences from which they developed, actively move beyond the monologic voice of the institutional church on the subject of LGBTQ issues, inviting and promoting open conversations about sexual diversity and the church. Those who read Inquiry, Thought, and Expression will encounter not just an excellent resource for research and teaching in the area of moral theology but also an opportunity to actively listen to and engage in groundbreaking discussions about faith and sexuality within and outside the Catholic Church.

1 Learning to Speak

KELBY HARRISON

Union Theological Seminary

The Catholic Church is a part of my sexual subjectivity1—in fruitful and insidious ways, some of which reach my conscious awareness and some of which do not. I am an openly queer woman, a scholar concerned with the history of sexual identity discourses, concerned with the various discourses of ethics, and predominantly concerned with thinking through constructive ethics for LGBT/Q2 people. The Catholic Church, perhaps to its chagrin, is a part of all of that. It has required a long process of deconstruction and reconstruction to find the strength and useful intellectual pathways to undertake this scholarly work. The influences of my Catholic upbringing and education linger.

The Catholic Church remains most legible in the patterns of my thinking and in my unexpected mimicry of its values. But what strikes me as interesting—in this briefest of self-narratives—is that despite the idiosyncrasies of my life, there is nothing unique in my narrative of learning how to articulate a new conception of sexual self in a culture deeply rooted and influenced by religious ideology. All queer people—Catholic, post-Catholic, and many religious others—learn to articulate new sexual identities. This is peculiar because the institutions and religious discourses that have most strongly shaped our subjectivities have offered next to nothing in terms of language to shape the articulation of sexual subjectivity.

To begin, yes, the church must learn to listen. But how and where do we—as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people—learn to speak? The sexual ideologies of religion and the Catholic Church that have shaped us are ideologies that often render us invisible and/or “intrinsically disordered.”3 Where in this space do we find narratives to articulate ourselves as created in the image of God, beloved and good, and at the same time to embrace and celebrate our embodied eros?

As I was thinking through and struggling with what I wanted to say in my opening remarks for the Fordham University conference on sexual diversity and the Catholic Church on the theme of “Learning to Listen,” I realized my concerns were much more about what is possible to say. I mean this in a theoretical way. How is it possible for a group of the faithful (or previously faithful, or even religiously influenced though secular) to speak up and back to a dominant and primary source of their own subject formation? This is an especially vexing question when we consider that our new discourse4 of sexual subjectivity must also be capable of critiquing the very premises of that subject formation. This is more than just speaking truth to power; it first requires an ability to figure out how to speak at all.

In a sense, this speaking is miraculous—a kind of speaking in tongues. Yet clearly LGBT/Q people speak—and in abundance—about their senses of identity, their sexual insights, and their sense of self. The task cannot be as simple as appropriating the new discourses of sexual subjectivity that make space for minority perspectives, although that is, of course, a part of the task. What I want to try to do in this essay is to look at the theoretical space of sexual subjectivity that must first open up before narratives of LGBT/Q sexual identity can take root. In order to do this, I will employ continental philosophy to begin to describe the contours of this space. Because lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer identities are contemporary identity versions of very old human sexual behaviors and gender nonconformities, it is important to frame how we theorize identity in our most modern of times—a time academics in the humanities refer to as postmodernism.

Postmodernity includes the appraisal that we—as subjects—are a product of discourses. Discourses are modes of organizing knowledge, ideas, and experience that are rooted in language and its concrete contexts of history and institutions. Discourses infuse our bodies in various ways; we become aware of some and remain unaware of others. We are constructed, socially, by the historical forces and disciplinary conversations of fields such as medicine, religion, philosophy, sociology, and culture that precede our existence yet define the parameters of both our experience of ourselves and our possibilities of identity. This history is an amalgamation, a continual building upon previous understandings and insights. Contemporary notions of identity may be quite recent, but the historical depth of their development is often richer than can be seen at a first, or even a considered, glance.

The Catholic Church can rightly claim deep history. It can claim a history that is much longer than the history of contemporary sexual identity. The Catholic Church is older than the “heterosexual,”5 it is older than the “homosexual,”6 and it is certainly older than the ambiguously ostensive “queer.”7 The contemporary church works hard to define the parameters of new questions in human sexuality,8 even when the results seem antiquated and ill-fitted to contemporary concerns. It is a historical and contemporary influence on the discursive modes of the social construction of human identity.

Contemporary LGBT/Q Catholics and post-Catholics9 live at the intersection of two discourses at war with each other: the liberative political discourses of minority sexual identities and the moral authority of the Catholic Church that seeks to limit embodied expressions of those identities. Oftentimes it is a silent war, where one side assumes it has won and the other side avoids the conflict because it knows it has not. The gentle negotiations that already wounded souls attempt to make with the hierarchy often do not produce change—sometimes they simply create safer spaces on the periphery of the church, engaging the ritual and the meaning without engaging the social hostility. But this cannot be enough for the future trajectory of social justice for LGBT/Q people. It will not be enough.

In what follows, I will articulate what I see as a foundational paradox in LGBT/Q (post-)Catholic subjectivity. This paradox is created by directly conflicting notions of morality in each of the two identities entwined to make a single subjectivity. On the one side there is the discourse and moral influence of the church—driven by the Vatican—that seeks nearly complete silence about nonheterosexual sexuality in tension with a counternarrative of LGBT/Q identities that are mostly secular and focused on identity pride and political and social recognition. Both of these identities—Catholic and politically LGBT/Q—are identities underpinned by an orientation toward the good. Both of these identities see the other as a hindrance to the achievement of that good. To create a deeper articulation of this paradox, I will engage Foucault and theories of subjectivity formation under discursive regimes, Sara Ahmed on ideas of queer orientation, and Charles Taylor on narrative theory and articulation of self as the good. I will conclude with some thoughts on why the church needs to learn to help LGBT/Q people speak, not just to listen to what we have to say.10

Foucault on Discourse, Subject Formation, and the Christian Pastorate

Michel Foucault, a French philosopher of the mid-to-late twentieth century, argues that our very conditions of possibility as sexual subjects arise within and under the scope of discourses and regimes of power. These discourses of sexual normalcy, salvation, moral rectitude, faith, and human value/dignity/worth crafted by institutions like the Catholic Church create sexual subjects who think of themselves as morally correct, valuable, and created in the intended image of God or as morally inferior, unworthy, and not in alignment with natural law. To understand how institutions create and control subjects, I will examine four aspects of Foucault’s theories of power: sexual repression as discourse proliferation, the construction of truth, the Christian pastorate, and docile bodies. All of these aspects of his understanding of power will help illuminate the Catholic influence—intended or otherwise—on sexual subjectivity.

Sexual Repression as Discourse Proliferation

One of the primary arguments of The History of Sexuality (volume 1) is that the Victorian era of repression did not in fact silence sexuality. Instead, Foucault argues, there was an incitement to discourse via the attempt to repress the discussion of sex; there was a “veritable discursive explosion.”11 Foucault writes:

sex was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence. From the singular imperialism that compels everyone to transform his sexuality into a perpetual discourse, to the manifold mechanisms which, in the areas of economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice, incite, extract, distribute, and institutionalize the sexual discourse, an immense verbosity is what our civilization has required and organized.12

Thus in the Victorian era we begin to see the conversation around sexuality develop in professionalized secular spaces, among experts who create secular institutions for the medicalization of sexual behavior. Sexuality ceases to be a moral issue but begins to become a psychological issue, an identity issue, a medical issue, and a social problem.

Also around this time, the Catholic Church began to lose its secure and tight hold over sexual discourse. Foucault writes, “the secure bond that held together the moral theology of concupiscence and the obligation of confession (equivalent to the theoretical discourse on sex and its first-person formulation) was, if not broken, at least loosened and diversified.”13 Now, individuals weighed down by guilt or concern over their sexual behavior did not solely have to go to priests to confess; they could go instead to doctors or psychiatrists. The first-person narrative of sexual desire was now under the purview of discourses outside of and away from the world of theology and ecclesial control.

The discourse of sexual identity began to take root in the science of sexology. The narratives available (first for the “invert,” then the “homosexual,” eventually the “lesbian” and “gay man,” and finally the “queer person”) were becoming purely secular. Perhaps the contemporary dis-ease between the Catholic Church and the LGBT/Q community is left over from exactly this separation. Perhaps the current silencing of LGBT/Q people by the Catholic hierarchy is a resentment created by and retained from the loss of control over the discourse of sexual deviancy that began in the 1800s.

At that time a split developed in how and by whom truth was established in the area of sexual morality. The discourses of sexology, psychology, and contemporary culture have defined the parameters of subaltern sexual identities, providing narratives of sexuality identity and certain kinds of frameworks for making sense of sexual experience—for example, “coming out of the closet.” These discourses are all contemporary constructions. The Catholic Church, however, is still employing moral theologies that have not realigned with these contemporary cultural discourses. Both sets of discourses cling to claims of truth that are backed by their distinct claims of power or expertise. In many ways, LGBT/Q Catholics and post-Catholics are still living at the intersection of this split. These observations ought to lead to an immediate set of questions about how power employs itself over bodies via claims of truth.

The Construction of Truth

Foucault argues that we need to see truth as a function of the politics of this world. We have been sold a myth of truth as a retrieval of fact created via study and increasing human insight. This myth misdirects how we ought to see the development of truth through its mechanisms of production and its impact. Foucault writes:

Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.14

This focus on the techniques and procedures of truth allows Foucault to isolate what he sees as five important traits of truth in the “political economy” of our contemporary society. Truth is (1) “centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions that produce it,” (2) “subject to constant economic and political incitement,” (3) an object of “immense diffusion and consumptions” through education and information technologies, (4) produced and “transmitted under the control … of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media),” and (5) constitutive of “ ‘ideological’ struggles.”15

I draw attention to these five mechanisms of truth production because they describe the growing bodies of literature and discourse on LGBT/Q identities and experience. Truth about sexual identity in the secular world is governed by these kinds of techniques of knowledge as power. I wish to emphasize the point that power—as Foucault sees it—is not a matter of repression. Power is not the process of saying no and policing prohibitions. Power “traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.” This productive aspect of power cannot be overlooked. The power of the Catholic Church produces Catholic people. The power of social and medical discourse produces LGBT/Q people. Each of these regimes of power can be seen as a “productive network which runs through the whole social body.”16 The points of social location one occupies will determine which pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1. Learning to Speak
• 2. Talking About Homosexuality by the (Church) Rules
• 3. Lesbian Nuns: A Gift to the Church
• 4. Seminary, Priesthood, and the Vatican’s Homosexual Dilemma
• 5. Same-Sex Marriage, the Right to Religious and Moral Freedom, and the Catholic Church
• 6. God Sets the Lonely in Families
• 7. Same-Sex Marriage and Catholicism: Dialogue, Learning, and Change
• 8. Embracing the Stranger: Reflections on the Ambivalent Hospitality of LGBTIQ Catholics
• 9. Domine, Non Sum Dignus: Theological Bullying and the Roman Catholic Church
• 10. Wild(e) Theology: On Choosing Love
• Afterword
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series Page