The Jesuit’s bridge for “LGBTQ” Catholics and the church is constructed with new rules of discourse that use “respect, compassion, and sensitivity” to queer doctrine regarding marriage and the family.
Table of Contents
Part 1: The First Step Is Changing Words
A company of Catholic academics and their allies aim to queer Catholic doctrine regarding Christian anthropology, marriage, and the family by transforming Catholic discourse.
Under the influence of postmodernism’s Critical theories, these Catholics – “thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” – divide the church community into identity groups. To achieve what diversity, equity, and inclusion has already accomplished in our public discourse, they exploit the Christian call to be respectful, compassionate, and sensitive in order to change how the institutional church talks and writes about sex, gender, and sexuality.
When Eve was told, “Your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods,” she was being addressed by the world’s first queer theorist.
As James Lindsey and Helen Pluckrose explain in Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity, in Critical theories the individual exists only at the intersection of “the identity groups to which the person in question simultaneously belongs.” Comprising an intolerant identity-based social justice ideology, Critical theories blur all “boundaries between the objective and subjective.” Reality being a “product of our socialization and lived experiences, as constructed” by language, judgments based upon reason, objective knowledge, and universal truth become taboo.
It is Critical Queer Theory that utilizes language as the means for breaking down, undermining, and dismantling norms. In CQT lexicon, to queer anything is to “cast doubt upon its stability, to disrupt seemingly fixed categories, and to problematize” any binaries within them.
Queer theory, which encompasses gender theory, liberates the human being from constraints, challenging the legitimacy of any discourse considered normative and, therefore, oppressive. Queering is, then, an “unmaking of any sense of the normal.”
Since there is little that is more normal than the traditional family, this places the Catholic Church – whose discourse makes it the Defender of Marriage and Family – in the direct line of attack.
Any universal idea emphasizing our common humanity is scorned within queer theory. Science itself is suspect: “there can be absolutely no quarter given to any discourse – even matters of scientific fact – that could be interpreted as promoting or legitimizing biological essentialism.” The bureaucratic scientific and medical establishments have already surrendered.
Bringing the discourse of Christianity into identity compliance is vital. Mainstream Protestant churches are conforming. The Catholic Theological Society of America, an organization of Critical Catholic theorist-theologians, is on board. Various European prelates – such as Bishop George Bätzing, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, and Jesuit Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich – are taking advantage of the current synodal path to pressure the institutional church in this direction. American prelates employ the jargon of Critical newspeak, asserting that the church’s oppressive “structures of exclusion” and “patterns of marginalization” wound various identities, including LGBTQ Catholics.
This identity-based sensibility is embraced by contemporary Jesuits. Their universities nurture it. The Jesuit School Network is guiding their secondary school educators toward the same end.
Few Catholics promote this political project of transformation within the institutional church more sincerely – and astutely – than Fr. James Martin, the thoroughly postmodern Jesuit, who in 2018 asserted that the “most marginalized person in the church” is the LGBTQ Catholic. “There’s no question” about it, he said.
Part 2: Caesar’s Bridge
Because I am a Catholic who is gay, I have an interest in Fr. Martin’s voluntary ministry to LGBTQ Catholics, a ministry with friends in high places.
His ministry emerged when he published in 2017 the first edition of Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity. [Fr. Martin, whose ordinary ministry is the media, now employs LGBTQ in his most recent writings, the Q representing the re-claimed Queer.]
The central argument of Building a Bridge transforms the church from a universal body of believers into a political body divided into identity groups with grievances – in this case, the secular identity involving “sexual orientation and gender.”
A “great chasm..has formed” between the institutional church and the LGBTQ community, whose members have “felt hurt … unwelcomed, excluded, and insulted,” declares Fr. Martin. Because it has made these Catholics “feel marginalized,” the church bears the “primary responsibility” for constructing a bridge of “dialogue and reconciliation” based upon “respect, compassion, and sensitivity.” [Italics in direct quotations throughout this series are mine.]
For church leaders to show “respect” for the group of Catholics whose sexual orientations and gender identities have been “invisible” to it, Fr. Martin says the church must address the group the way it “asks to be called.”
“People have a right to name themselves,” he says. Of course, the “people” naming us are the elite leadership of political organizations, such as GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign.
No person is LGBTQ. The LGBTQ Catholic, the “most marginalized person in the church,” does not exist. This formulation of intersecting sexual and gender identities bears no relation to the imago Dei. It does, however, represent a political alliance of convenience that is, as Carl Trueman observes, logically incoherent. The sexual orientation of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals is, like that of heterosexuals, rooted in the sex binary, the existence of which is denied by trans men, trans women, and sundry gender identities.
Fr. Martin’s example of “respect” is bunk, but even bunk can serve a serious purpose. As more bishops use the acronym, the desired effect is achieved. A group of Catholics, distinguished from the fold by same-sex attraction and gender identity, are recognized by a Church speaking as Caesar speaks.
Part 3: Bridge of Transformation
In a queered church, it becomes insufficiently respectful for me to be acknowledged as a person created in the image of God unless my individual humanity is modified. I must be “named” with a group identity, and talked about with an adolescent sense of respect, compassion, and sensitivity.
In the new rules of discourse, compassion and sensitivity, as well as respect, can only be demonstrated through affirmation and acquiescence. Fr. Martin repeatedly asks the institutional church to “listen” to LGBTQ Catholics without stating its Critical theory corollary – listening is transformative because it changes the listener; if transformation has not occurred, neither has listening.
Fr. Martin’s chasm does not exist in the Catholic church, which is our bridge to salvation. What does exist is a group of Catholics who want the church to redefine sin and thereby embrace the secular mores of the State, and who “other” any opposition to their goals as hate.
His ministry is closely aligned with New Ways Ministry, a “Catholic outreach that educates and advocates for equity, inclusion, and justice for LGBTQ+ persons, equipping leaders to build bridges of dialogue with the Church and civil society.” Fr. Martin was its 2016 Bridge Building Award recipient.
Firmly antiracist in its “support of BIPOC communities (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color),” whose liberation is “an integral aspect of our work for LGBTQ equality,” New Ways advances “an intersectional understanding of gender identity and sexuality.” Enthusiastic supporters of Black Lives Matter, which seeks to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” New Ways advocates for marriage equality and is sympathetic to the centering of queerness in any Catholic discussions of sex and the family.
That Fr. Martin refers to church doctrine on these matters as a “stance” is a tell. Political organizations, responding to popular feeling, have stances on issues of the day: the Catholic church has doctrine rooted in objective truth.
What he calls a chasm is a political creation, shaped within an ongoing sexual revolution, egged on by Critical theorists whose intent is to dismantle the most oppressive of power structures: the family – and its major defender, the most significant Christian institution remaining that, thus far, refuses to bend.
His bridge implants within the church the identity politics responsible for the recent rapid acceleration of that revolution.
Part 4: The Bridge-Builder Ignores the Earthquake
In the introduction to his book’s second edition, Fr. Martin addresses why, in its first, he omitted any discussion of same-sex marriage and homosexual relations: He wants Building a Bridge to focus on areas of commonality – dialogue and reconciliation – because “not everything has to be about sex.”
The “stance” of the church, he explains, and the stance of LGBTQ Catholics on these topics are simply “too far apart”: same-sex relations are, says the church, “impermissible,” but for LGBTQ Catholics “same-sex relations are part-and-parcel” of our lives.
That Fr. Martin refers to church doctrine on these matters as a “stance” is a tell. Political organizations, responding to popular feeling, have stances on issues of the day: the Catholic church has doctrine rooted in objective truth.
Because Fr. Martin avoids truth, his book pulls the reader away from reality into an illusion: Nothing especially unusual has been taking place in society; what is remarkable is the hostility of those who oppose what has been taking place.
The reality is that we witnessed the successful queering of the institution of marriage a mere two years before the 2017 publication of Building a Bridge. What does it tell us about his bridge that the architect ignores a social earthquake of such magnitude?
It is foolish not to appreciate this revolutionary change in the secular institution of marriage. Marriage has been neutered: it is fundamentally sterile and without any immutable limiting principle. Its aftershocks continue.
In the half-decade following Obergefell vs. Hodges, Merriam-Webster, Collins Dictionary and the Macmillan Dictionary no longer mention man and woman in their definitions of marriage. Dictionary.com references the two sexes only when defining an altogether new subcategory, “opposite-sex marriage.”
Children now grow into adulthood unmoored from the historical reality of an institution as it existed for thousands of years. Husbands now marry husbands; wives now marry wives. Secular marriage ratifies a legal partnership of the present, its connection to society’s future – to children – no longer implied.
Simultaneously, woman and man are being redefined. Among the official definitions for woman in the Cambridge Dictionary is “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they [sic] may have been said to have a different sex at birth.” Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year for 2022 is woman because the word, dominating the cultural conversation, “reflects the intersection of gender, identity, and language.”
Part 5: Maia Kobabe Wrote a Book About Eir Path to Coming Out to Eir Family
Our language’s grammar is reduced to nonsense to appease the adolescent sensibilities of people unable to cope unless the world conforms to their feelings. Adults inform children they can choose their own pronouns, even make up entirely new pronoun forms. Teachers are being required to use them.
Fr. Martin justifies this, suggesting to ordinary folks – and Catholic school leadership – that the refusal to use someone else’s preferred pronouns is “offensive, insulting, and shaming” and compromises the “safety” of LGBTQ people. According to Fr. Dan Horan, a Franciscan theologian much recommended by Fr. Martin, this refusal is “unchristian and sinful.”
Fr. Horan, who is co-teaching a year-long course in Queer Theology – you do realize there is such a theology? – at St. Mary’s College at Notre Dame, finds it disgraceful “that so many of those who self-identify as Catholic use our faith tradition to reject and erase the self-identities of our sisters, brothers and other siblings in Christ.”
What to my “unchristian” ear is bizarre phrasing – “other siblings in Christ” – exhibits sensitivity for the self-creators, who “are” non-binary or gender-fluid or, in some other sense, queer.
God is not the author of this confusion, nor is the institutional church, despite Fr. Martin’s belief that, through its discourse, it is “contributing to division.” The church should be “a sign of unity…in all times,” he says, even as he divides its members into political identities.
Was God’s command regarding the tree of knowledge of good and evil a sign of division or one of unity? Fr. Martin does not say. But when Eve was told, “Your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods,” she was being addressed by the world’s first queer theorist.
Part 6: Is “I Do Not Challenge Church Teachings” a Lie?
Whether or not Fr. Martin rejects the church’s teachings on marriage and sexual relations has puzzled some Catholics, perhaps because his writing style possesses a studied elusiveness that provides him plausible deniability.
In the second edition’s chapter regarding “sensitivity,” Fr. Martin decided to add the three paragraphs (2357 – 2359) from the Catechism regarding Chastity and Homosexuality.
Does he use this renewed opportunity to explain Church teaching? No.
Instead, he highlights what he regards as the insensitivity of the church’s “hurtful” discourse, which “needlessly offends” when it declares that a homosexual inclination is “objectively disordered” and that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,… (and) contrary to the Natural Law.”
He concludes by mentioning a comment from the mother of a gay son about the Church’s discourse: for a 14-year-old gay boy to “read language like that…could destroy him,” she says.
Catholic discourse, you see, is violence. It wounds. It nurtures bullies. It leads to suicide.
Using emotional blackmail is standard practice when logic and reason give way to subjectivity. Seeding guilt is effective when your audience includes adults who fear being judged bigots more than they fear lies, and especially effective when your audience includes impressionable teenagers.
He introduces this sensibility in his article in America that more fully elaborates “official church teaching on homosexuality,” foregrounding the suffering of LGBTQ people: many believe “God hates them,” many are “tempted to suicide because of their sexual orientation,” and many “feel that their own church has rejected them.”
But before proceeding to Church teachings on homosexuality, Fr. Martin inserts a personal parenthetical comment: “As a Catholic priest,” he tells us, “I have also never challenged those teachings, nor will I.”
Part 8: The Bad Teacher
Priests are the church’s front-line teachers in matters of faith and dogma.
But any teacher – even a non-believer – can present information that imparts the “what” of specific church doctrine.
When an English instructor guides his students through Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, he is not simply presenting the words. The duty of a teacher is to light a pathway into the play’s beauty – its poetry and form – so that the reader’s understanding of human nature and the world is thereby enriched. A good educator is able to do this when he has the necessary skills, when he demonstrably loves the work, and when he believes that teaching it has immense value for his students.
Fr. Martin has the skills. But he is convinced church discourse concerning homosexuality is “unnecessarily cruel” and insensitive to “what might hurt or offend someone.” He does not love the work he teaches.
Educators are called to teach the true, the good, and the beautiful. This demands of them a deep appreciation for the judgments of our cultural, intellectual, and spiritual predecessors who have built a civilization. If we cannot guide subsequent generations into this rich heritage, we leave them unable to distinguish between what feels right and what is right.
A change in language in one area of teaching ripples across others. Respect, compassion, and sensitivity per the new rules of discourse require the church to reconsider its “stance” on the blessings of same-sex unions. For the church to maintain that “sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman” (2360) becomes micro-aggressive and hurtful.
Fr. Martin fails to mention that the language regarding homosexuality exists within the Catechism’s consideration of the Sixth Commandment, which itself lies within an unfolding tapestry of catechesis regarding our vocation as human beings participating “in the light and power of divine Spirit.” By our reason and free will, we are called to find perfection “in seeking and loving what is true and good” despite our nature bearing “the wound of original sin.” We are, as a result of the Fall, inclined toward evil and subject to error, but through Christ, we are delivered “from Satan and from sin.” (1702 – 1708)
In Church tradition, the Sixth Commandment encompasses “the whole of human sexuality,” which is “ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman.” It is in marriage that “the physical intimacy of the spouses becomes a sign and pledge of spiritual communion.” (2360) It is in this Commandment that all of us are reminded of our vocation to chastity, “the successful integration of sexuality within the person.” (2337)
Part 9: Respect, Compassion, Sensitivity, and Sodomy
But let’s say the language is changed.
Instead of being “objectively disordered” or “intrinsically disordered,” perhaps the church describes my homosexual inclination and the homosexual acts in which I engage as “differently ordered.” Or perhaps, as the German bishops concluded in a recent Synodal document, my homosexual acts could be considered “not intrinsically bad.”
If homosexual acts are not “disordered,” then God must have ordained them. If they are “not intrinsically bad,” then God must have designed them as good. And since they are part of God’s order or goodness regarding human sexuality, we should have no objection to discussing those “differently ordered” or “not intrinsically bad” homosexual acts.
If sodomy is part of God’s design, are anal and oral sex simply nuanced forms of complementarity? What about mutual masturbation of the genitals? Catholics who support “marriage equality” need not be reticent: Explain how two men having homosexual relations function as “ministers of the design established by the Creator.”
Even now, some Catholic theologians recommended by Fr. Martin, such as Craig Ford at St. Norbert’s College, are developing a more queer natural law theory that would holistically enfold within natural law the sexual inclinations and actions of LGBTQ Catholics.
A change in language in one area of teaching, of course, ripples across others. Respect, compassion, and sensitivity per the new rules of discourse require the church to reconsider its “stance” on the blessings of same-sex unions.
For the church to maintain that “sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman” (2360) is micro-aggressive and hurtful, especially as these words immediately follow its teachings regarding homosexuality, an insulting juxtaposition unmentioned by Fr. Martin. That discourse will have to change.
The Fourth Commandment’s descriptions of marriage and the family are neither inclusive nor equitable: to say that a “man and a woman united in marriage, together with their children, form a family” (2202) and that this “Christian family is a communion of persons” who “in the procreation and education of children…reflects the Father’s work of creation” (2205) is heteronormative. This doctrine must be queered.
Catechesis regarding the Sacrament of Matrimony (1601 – 1666) cannot remain unaffected. A conjugal love that “aims at a deeply personal unity…open to fertility” can, if nuanced by theologians, surely encompass sodomy as a metaphorical allusion to fertility.
But let’s say that Church discourse remains as is because it is True.
The Church tells me my homosexual inclination is objectively disordered. Well, what is actually offensive about that to me or any other believing Catholic?
I know God created us male and female. That is objectively true. I know that He created the two so that one completes the other when united as one flesh. I know that this design is essential for life, to the protection of which the Church is always called. I know that this order is essential for our survival as a species.
What could be more Good and Beautiful than such a design? It has been celebrated in the most glorious works of art – painting, literature, sculpture, music and song – since mankind began creating art. What is not to love about this design?
Am I supposed to feel forever wounded because my otherwise ordered gifts don’t include the ordered sexual inclination most men possess? Yes, it can be painful for any kid not to be like “everyone else,” but it is not a calamity. Nor is such pain necessarily of any greater weight than any other person’s. All human beings suffer; suffering is not a competitive event.
A disordered inclination does not separate me or anyone from God or His design. His blessings have provided numerous other gifts ordered to His love and the world He has created for us. My sexual attraction to other men, even when acted upon, does not estrange me from reconciliation with God. We are fallen creatures. We sin, and though sin is not part of God’s design, His love for us is. His graces abound.
It does not help teenagers for educators – adults – to lie to them, nor to nurture the self-pity and sense of victimhood to which adolescents are naturally prone. Fornication is a challenge for heterosexuals as well as homosexuals. Mercy does not require a different discourse because the orientation of Catholics like myself is not ordered to the conjugal love between a man and a woman. Politics does. Mercy requires love and truth. And humor, too.
The institutional church is quite aware that the practice of chastity is “an apprentice in self-mastery,” which is “a long and exacting work.” It “presupposes renewed effort throughout life,” efforts that are “especially intense…when the personality is being formed” during teenage years.
Self-mastery, which ought to be everyone’s quest, arises from training in the virtues which, per C. S. Lewis, forms the chest. Our sins against chastity are simply that — sins – and Catholic educators have a duty to instill in their charges an understanding that sin is real, that sin we will, and that over time, through reason and free will, we can master much of our inclination to sin.
Fr. Martin’s concerns about language in Church doctrine exist within a Critical paradigm that raises the subjective – our feelings – to the level of truth. At its heart lies the devious assumption that human beings who are LGBTQ are so enfeebled by suffering, so wounded by incessant bullying, so weakened of character that they are unable to grasp the logic and beauty of God’s Word.
The Church bars no one from entering. It places no one on the margins. It respects each individual Catholic’s free will and reason. It expects its members to fall – repeatedly. And it provides the richness of the Sacraments by which we, as fallen human beings, may reconcile with God, receive His graces, and be led to eternal salvation.
First published January 27, 2023, at Jesuit School @ Substack; slightly modified for The Jesuit School.