Catholic Priests, Queer Ambiguities, Category Anxieties

Greeley writes in The Catholic Imagination (2000) that the priest “is a sacrament” and sets up the priest as “someone special,” locating the priest unstably between intimacy and oddity. Forms of queer sacramentality are not somewhere “out there” in Catholicism but riddle the genealogy of American Catholic studies – “the priest” is an intimately and uncomfortably close queer sacramental site. Often associated with category anxieties (such as between human and divine, masculine and feminine), here I focus on the category anxiety “the priest” precipitates between religious and scholarly authority, or between Catholicism and Catholic studies scholarship (exemplified in priest-scholars like Greeley). I explore the ways that Catholic studies has stabilized a normative classificatory scheme utilizing categories like “the priest” that reproduce gender and sexuality categories from Catholicism. The ambiguities and categorical shiftiness of “the priest” have functioned in Catholic studies to normativize oddity through the admixture of religious and scholarly authority.