Sacramental Justice as Queer Sacramentality

What would a queer Catholic sacramentality look like? Drawing from Andrew Greely’s vision of Catholic sacramentality, recent calls for a more politicized queer theory, and an ethnography of US independent Catholics, this paper illuminates the queer sacramentality of independent US Catholic churches as “sacramental justice.” Sacramental justice provides unrestricted access to the Eucharist and, in doing so, enacts a counterpublic consisting of a communion of bodies across differences sharing sources of material, spiritual, and affectionate abundance. The key aspects of this sacramental justice are nondiscriminatory ordination, radical hospitality, and promiscuous ecumenism. Having elaborated these aspects, the paper concludes by 1) proffering sacramental justice as a critical and politicalized queer practice exemplifying what William Cavanaugh envisions as the Eucharist’s “different kind of politics” and what Susan Ross heralds as the “extravagant affections” of a feminist Eucharistic theology; and 2) calling for the imperative to queer the category “Catholic.”