.jpg){kind=link}
Last week, the Catholic Church infuriated queer communities the world over. Basically, the current Pope had made several moves to promote homosexuals from satanic pariahs to puzzling noncombatants in the holy worldview. Then in a time-honored tradition, Rome released a document saying there still has to be some rules, and transgender people remain morally deficient:
"Infinite Dignity" details a long list of what it calls grave threats to that dignity, some of which might be expected given other Catholic teachings. It talks about the drama of poverty and how the unequal distribution of wealth denies humans their God-given dignity. It also describes war, the abuse of migrants, sexual abuse, violence against women, the marginalizing of people with disabilities, assisted suicide and abortion all as affronts to human dignity.
But then the document turns to other issues that have become more highly politicized in recent years: surrogacy, gender theory, and what it calls "sex change."
“Infinite Dignity” is a classic work of Catholic bureaucracy. The first third reads like a freshman term paper, quibbling over Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. Next comes the classic themes of economic justice, condemning war and poverty and other stuff that keeps a rump presence of white liberals in Catholic pews grudgingly pacified. Finally, it gets down to business and rants about reproductive and gender health care like a drunk uncle at the holiday dinner table:
57. Regarding gender theory, whose scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts, the Church recalls that human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God. This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good. Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.
As far as condemnations go, transgender people being heathen gods is pretty metal. The first man I slept with was transmasc, which explains my subsequent meteoric slut run that included converting both a straight and a lesbian. I have received forbidden wisdom from him who made himself God; behold my eldritch chaos bi power!
I was raised but not born Catholic, and you might think this left a mark on a bisexual autistic former altar boy who grew up in south Louisiana during the heyday of Operation Rescue. And I certainly have plenty of biographical grievances against conservative Catholics, including estrangement from both my parents. On the other hand, the Catholic Church per se was more of a foreboding neutral party in my road from terrified repression to marriage-wrecking bisexual hedonism.
In my most distant memories, my parents didn't start out religious. They sent me to a private Episcopal school at first, but that was bog standard racism, not piety. We went to church on Sundays, and that was that. Shortly after my sister was born, something changed. We started going to an evangelical church on the outskirts of town. The Church of the Holy Spirit was technically Episcopalian, but it was nothing like the sedate pews of St. James. Singing, chanting, and speaking in tongues were common occurrences. There were a lot of church events too: coffee meetups, crawfish boils, prayer drives, and strangest to me at the time, abortion protests.
When I first asked my mother about abortion, we were in New Orleans outside Audubon Park; I was in a music camp for the cello. The topic came up on NPR on the car radio, and so I asked her what abortion was. Within the space of a few minutes, my mother descended into hysterical tears, choking out that it was when people “murder unborn babies” and “just throw them away like trash.” It terrified me; by that point, she was also saying that she witnessed clashes between angels and demons in church services.
Then one day, when I was about as old as my younger son is now, we went to the Catholic church of St. Andrews. The service was night and day from the previous festivities: chanting, kneeling, and intoned prayers replaced laying on of hands and slightly unhinged glossolalia. I had no idea why we switched again, but I did like it better. There were rules, procedures, directions. If you memorized the prayers and followed the rules, things would work out okay.
I was moved into a Catholic school in fourth grade. It was run by crusty old nuns, one of whom taught me algebra by scaring the shit out of me on a regular basis. Yes, I took classes on religion, there was no sex education to speak of, and homophobic slurs were the norm in the schoolyard. On the other hand, evolution was taught as proven science, and I frankly don’t remember being taught anything about queerness. I’m pretty sure it fell along the lines of “love the sinner, hate the sin,” but by far the biggest pressure I faced was from my peers.
But my home life was spiraling into a nightmare. We moved to a soggy five acre lot on the outskirts of Zachary, a quarter mile away from our nearest neighbor. Both my parents would later blame the other for the move, but at the time both emphatically agreed that they needed to take me and my siblings away from the “evil” of our previous quiet neighborhood near LSU. My mother started homeschooling my siblings, and she would physically cut out articles from the newspapers she thought were inappropriate for me to read. My father held nightly Bible readings and rosaries, and lectured me and my siblings at length on his theological views.
I lost almost all of my social circle; there was almost no chance of meeting friends so far removed from everything. My parents associated with other families who would now be called tradcath: ballooning numbers of children, homeschooling, “traditional” clothing, daily prayers, and corporal punishment (including, in one case, a literal horse whip). As we got deeper into the anti-abortion paint, they associated with fewer conventional Catholics, and more evangelical and charismatic Christians. Speaking in tongues became a regular feature of the daily prayers at home, and during summer breaks we’d go to Mass every single day. My father was the lead attorney for Operation Rescue during their 1992 campaign in Baton Rouge, during which time a rotating cast of itinerant protestors boarded in our house. I was also taken to a string of tent revivals that followed organized abortion protests to raise money and fervor for the cause. At one such, the preacher called for homosexuals to be met in the streets with shotguns to adoring cheers. At another, the speaking in tongues got so overwhelming and frightening that I clasped my hands over my ears until they were done shouting.
This bizarre, terrifying soup of fringe religious movements would later inspire me to focus on apocalyptic movements in graduate school. I eventually understood my experiences as a liminal space, where fervor glued a huge spectrum of wild theories and beliefs together. I researched cognitive science to understand how ritual works as mimetic communication, and that the unhinged outbursts of speaking in tongues and seizures functioned as a device to keep congregations in a dysregulated emotional state. And I found that the best explanation for the anti-abortion movement was actually rooted in Peter Lake’s landmark analysis of anti-Catholicism, in which a negative foil is used to maintain group identity.
I clung to Catholicism for a long time while doing this. My first marriage was Catholic-officiated, and I took the mandatory pre-wedding classes with X1. I even went so far as to get myself Confirmed, which had never actually happened during my family conversion in childhood. It seemed clear to me that what I had experienced had very little to do with the Catholic Church. I even remember my mother complaining about a parish priest gently declining her Karenesque demands to thunder against abortion at the pulpit, saying “...do you know how many women in my congregation have had abortions?”
Alas, the Catholic Church was still ploddingly, infuriatingly Catholic.
In 2006, the Archdiocese of Boston canceled adoption services rather than conform to state law requiring them to admit gay parents as prospective adoptees. And just like that, I was done. At the time, I didn’t understand why that was the final straw; my own coming out was still fifteen years in the future. It was just intolerable, even excruciating. My own conception of the faith was grounded in Matthew 6:
“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret.”
It was not important what one professed; it was important what one did, when the lights were off and no one was keeping score. And yet there the Church was, putting public professions over giving to the needy. That was the end of it for me.
In the official estimate of Rome, I am now infinitely undignified. I remarried after divorcing, then divorced again. I have forgotten how many people I’ve slept with, both men and women. At one point I calculated how many abortions I’m responsible for as a function of my contributions to pro-choice causes and politicians, just to prove it to myself. I wrote smut this year of a threesome that starts with licking the penitent ash off of a lover’s forehead.
Ironically, my perspective remains heavily influenced by Catholicism. The other day I told my partner Marie that there’s a Catholic God-shaped hole in my conception of morality. I’m allergic to professions of faith without deeds; obligation to charity in whatever form I can maintain is as fundamental to me as breathing; I confess my faults even and especially when they’re not actual faults; I still struggle with self-worth alongside a stubbornly persistent fear of Original Sin. If you put your hand over the absence of the sacraments, queer degeneracy, and serial divorces, I seem pretty close to a devout Catholic. By some estimates, the degeneracy makes me all the more Catholic.
But it’s called the queer community for a reason. Rome doesn’t get to be the ultimate intermediary anymore, no matter how much Aquinas they quote. You swipe at one of us (such as my first same-gender partner), you swipe at us all. No, the Catholic Church did not visit indignity on me personally; at least, no more so than my general environment. But it sure as hell didn’t grant me any dignity when it counted either, and by the rules I took away from my Catholic upbringing, that counts as an irreconcilable difference.