This panel foreground three distinct critical perspectives that deploy queer theory to study Catholic sacramentality. Drawing also from gender studies, theology, and ethnography theses paper work 1) to analyze the ways in which queer and sacramental performativity actualize the eschatological ends of the human body and the Catholic Church; 2) to interrogate how the Catholic priest is singled out as occupying a particularly ambiguous position whose “categorical shiftiness” has functioned in Catholic studies to normativize oddity through the admixture of religious and scholarly authority, and 3) to approach the queering of sacramentality as an issue of sacramental justice that enacts a counterpublic that demands unrestricted access to the Eucharist that is built upon nondiscriminatory ordination, radical hospitality, and promiscuous ecumenism.
This paper argues that queer gender performativity can be understood as functioning, ecclesiologically and eschatologically, in a way analogous to sacraments within Catholic theology. The paper begins with a survey of the Church as Sacrament in Avery Dulles’s Models of the Church before placing Dulles in dialogue with Kimberly Belcher and Judith Butler. Through this dialogue, I contend that both gender and sacramentality share a connection of efficacious performativity – both produce the reality they signify. In this light, both queer and sacramental performativity are seen to foreshadow and actualize the eschatological ends of both the human body and the Church. This theological framework results in an expanded view of the 'Catholic sacramental imagination' that embraces queerness as 'sacramentally' revelatory of the age to come.
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.
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.”
| Anthony Petro, Boston University | apetro@bu.edu | View |