“Our Greatest Dignity is Not to Be Parts of a Body”: Catherine of Siena and Simone Weil on Disability in Christ’s Mystical Body

This paper examines theologies of the mystical body of Christ articulated by Catherine of Siena and Simone Weil, respectively, towards a mystically-informed political orientation to sickness, disability, and vulnerability that neither theodicizes suffering nor issues an imperative to perfect, productive cure. I contend that the mystical body in Catherine’s Dialogue is urgently relevant as a theological underpinning of what Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant call “extractive abandonment” – the process of statemaking by which the sick and disabled, those deemed unhealthy (unproductive), are necessarily abjected as surplus profitable to capital. I therefore read Weil’s critique of the mystical body as a critique of this political economy of abjection, arguing that Weil re-envisions the mystical body towards a political theology of disability justice that demands, as Adler-Bolton and Vierkant write, a “radical abundance of care.”