This volume and its companion (subtitledVoices of Our Times¹) represent an effort to memorialize and broaden the discussions begun in the scholarly presentations that comprised one focus of the More than a Monologue series of conferences that were held in the autumn of 2011.² The subtitle of this volume,Inquiry, Thought, and Expression, recognizes that these essays are presented in solidarity with the wisdom promulgated by the Second Vatican Council inGaudium et Spes(the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World).³ The Council expressed its hope for the Catholic Church that the laity would pursue theological...

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...

Those are pieces from the opening of a book I wrote a few years ago. The introduction struck some people as irreverent. Perhaps they were right—though there are much more irreverent pages later on in the book. What they could not know is that the opening was the remnant of another book I started to write and then threw away.

In that discarded text, I had asked myself just the question I imagined for the Vatican: What else would have to change in Roman Catholic teaching if the pope did awake one morning, resolved to reverse the condemnation of...

Homosexual issues have gained increasing prominence on the Catholic Church’s agenda in the last several decades, but when the topic of homosexuality and church ministers is raised, inevitably the conversation focuses on gay priests and male religious. This may be so for a variety of reasons. Gay priests and male religious are certainly much more visible or “out” than lesbian religious sisters. It may be that there are greater numbers of gay priests and brothers than lesbian nuns,¹ but the attention paid to gay priests and brothers may also reflect a sexist culture that is more interested in males than...

The ongoing clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church has focused attention on the disproportionately high percentage of homosexual priests and seminarians compared to the general population.¹ Estimates as to the precise number of gay seminarians and priests are as controversial as they are varied.² And perhaps the Vatican’s 2005 ban on any future gay seminarians was introduced in part to put an end to the speculation. But current official Catholic teaching on homosexuality, which I will argue in this paper to be inherently unstable, coupled with the continued requirement of celibacy for priests of the Roman Rite, has...

In this essay, I explain why what we may call “the exclusion policy”—excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage—violates the internationally recognized right to religious and moral freedomif the policy is based on the principal rationale that the pope and bishops of the Catholic Church give in support of the policy.

The statement of the right to religious and moral freedom that is articulated in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is canonical in this sense: The great majority of the countries of the world—over 85 percent—are parties to the ICCPR: As of...

Catholics believe that moral judgments should cohere with sound interpretations of the Bible and the living Tradition, but we also believe that the reasonableness of public policies should be evident to all persons of good will, regardless of their faith or lack thereof.¹ Consequently, Catholic teachings about the common good should be consistent, comprehensive, and cohere with scientifically documented evidence. Since the focus of this essay is on the civil licensing, not the blessing, of same-sex marriages, these shall be the norms for this argument.

Today the Roman Catholic Church officially teaches that all homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.”² In...

This paper and the volume in which it appears were inspired in part by the 2008 decision of the Connecticut Supreme Court, in a 4–3 vote, to recognize same-sex marriage. The Connecticut Catholic Conference, claiming to represent the bishops, clergy, and laity of the state, condemned this decision, citing the dissenting opinion of Justice Peter Zarella: “The ancient definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman has its basis in biology, not bigotry.”¹ On similar grounds, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has advocated for the Defense of Marriage Act against the federal administration...

You are no longer strangers and aliens, but … citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.

Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 2:19

The stranger has long haunted Christian life. Paul’s assurance to the faithful at Ephesus—“You are no longer strangers … but citizens”—illuminates a kind of community that moves from alienation to belonging. Citizenship is fluid, secured not through documentation but relationship. The ambiguity of the stranger’s location—as one standing outside, peering in—is resolved by a community’s embrace. Rather than a problematic presence, the stranger defines the boundaries at which belonging...

Much has been written recently about the classroom bullying of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth. Since the fall of 2010, the press has reported a number of horrific suicides, most often those of young teenagers who killed themselves after being bullied repeatedly by their classmates for their actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.¹ The syndicated columnist Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller founded the “It Gets Better” project in late 2010 as a response to these suicides.²

Sadly, as of the summer of 2012, the series of bullying-related suicides by gay youth has continued unabated....

This essay began as a talk in a panel entitled “Lord, I Am Not Worthy to Receive You,” words taken from the order of the mass. Thus I could not resist (in speech or in prose) beginning with a quotation from perhaps the most famous Catholic homosexual (if deathbed convert), Oscar Wilde. Imprisoned in 1895 for “gross indecency” (homosexual acts), Wilde writes Bosie Douglas—his former lover and his enemy—with praise and blame: “Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, andDomine, non sum dignus[Lord, I am not worthy] should be on the lips and in...

It is a striking truth that when religious reflection takes place at some point other than the power center of the church, wonderful things often happen. The two most notable instances of theology from the margins in recent times have been the ferment of thought associated in the first place with Latin American theology of liberation and the equally fruitful conversation between feminist, womanist, andmujeristatheologies throughout the Americas. Both phenomena began as examples of previously marginalized voices insisting on having their day at center stage. As they developed from the 1960s onward, they also began to pay more...