Catholic Priests, Queer Ambiguities, Category Anxieties

Greeley writes in The Catholic Imagination (2000) that “In the Catholic tradition, the priest is more than mere preacher of the word. He is a sacrament” (147). Greeley argues that the priest has human-divine duality, recognized by laypeople as a human but “someone special,” pointing to the priest’s doubleness and extraordinariness as features of the Catholic imaginary (147). I take Greeley’s description of the priest as “someone special” – locating the priest somewhere between intimacy and oddity – as an unstable starting point for developing a queer religious studies framing of “the priest” as a queer sacramental site infused with ambiguities.

In this paper, I read Greeley’s The Catholic Imagination (2000) as part of the discourse about “priests” in which scholars participate when we elaborate “the priest” in our scholarship. Reading Greeley’s text as participating in a broader discourse contributing to the construction of the category of “the priest” stretches Greeley’s own idea of the Catholic imaginary; the Catholic imaginary is also where Catholics, scholars of Catholicism, and anyone who perceives of Catholicism comes to imagine, define, and argue for what Catholicism is, who Catholics are, and what authorizes their Catholicity. Here I direct our attention to the ways that Catholic studies scholarship has constructed the category of “the priest,” with a focus on the way that the category has become naturalized and stabilized, in part by scholars employing heteronormative and cisnormative classificatory schemes. The process of creating “the priest” as a thing, type, or site attempts to stitch together ambiguously layered and unpredictably scattered parts that refuse to make up a whole. “The priest” shiftily makes conceptual pivots between sexually desirably and sexually perverse; effeminate and woman-stealing; democratized and reified; alter Christus and office administrator; masculine and feminine; humankind and Christ. The category anxiety that I am most interested in here, however, is the priest’s movement between “religion” and “religious studies,” exemplified in priest-scholars like Greeley who are embedded throughout Catholic studies' genealogy. When the priest’s intimacy and oddity turns back on the Catholic studies scholar, the question becomes, taking up a queer religious studies angle, not how to neutralize or normativize the priest’s oddity, but how to theorize out of the oddity of this uncomfortably close queer sacramental site. 

In the genealogy of Catholic studies, priests have trafficked between “Catholic studies” and “Catholicism” (and “religious studies” and “religion”), elucidating the porousness of these borders. Those of us Catholic studies scholars who are not priests, too, participate in religious authority (our own "priestliness") by discursively elaborating religious categories like “the priest” and authorizing our interlocutors’ Catholicism by including them in our scholarship. Our interlocutors are always selected, and are selected by our reading their Catholicity as appropriately normative, fitting within naturalized Catholic categories (like “laywoman”). Priests’ closeness to Catholic studies, as well as our scholarly reproduction of Catholicism’s classificatory schemes – in short, the porousness of the border between “Catholic studies” and “Catholicism” - has shaped a Catholic studies that employs heteronormative and cisnormative gender and sexuality categories that closely resemble those of Catholicism. I want to direct our attention in relation to this category anxiety in two ways – toward the closeness of clergy sex abuse and toward the inadequacy of feminist religious studies approaches. First, we scholars are not located somewhere uncontaminated or outside of the erotic power structures of Catholicism; the same dynamics that precipitate subjects of abuse become the classificatory schemes employed in our scholarship. Any critique of Catholic systems of abuse from within Catholic studies is uniquely impeded until we can critically examine the normativity of approaches to sexuality within Catholic studies. Second, feminist religious studies approaches within Catholic studies have naturalized a stagnant view of gender and have occluded the usefulness of gender as an analytic. Feminist religious studies approaches to priests have reified “priests” as a category and entrenched the category’s cisness and maleness through critique. Similarly, feminist religious studies approaches have focused on “laywomen’s” and “sisters’” experiences, assuming these categories to be cleanly bounded by gender, rather than examining how these experiences come to be authorized as “women’s” or as “Catholic.” A focus on queer sacramentality brings to the fore what is neither politically laudable, nor secularly digestible, nor congruent with a feminist stance – priests in their entire oddity and intimacy to Catholicism and Catholic studies. 

Forms of queer sacramentality are not somewhere “out there” in Catholicism but riddle the genealogy of American Catholic studies. The discourse about priests that Catholic studies scholars create and circulate has stabilized and organized the category of “the priest,” which has occluded the usefulness of “the priest” as an ambiguous analytical resource for destabilizing normative configurations of Catholicism, sacramentality, Catholic gender, and Catholic sexuality. The potential of “the priest” for precipitating “category crisis” in abutting categories has been elucidated in queer theory; in Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests (1992), she poses the priest’s body as suspiciously concealed under a “cowl and flowing robes,” ambiguously veiled in cross-dressed layers (16; 220). A queer religious studies approach to Catholic priests refuses the possibility of observation, classification, and definition, refocusing on the oddity of the priestly body, the limits of our scholarly gaze, and the voyeurism of our desire to know. Refusing the possibility of lifting the veil (or vestment) on the unsettling priestly body, a queer religious studies angle insists on “the priest’s” ambiguity. Rather than precipitating “category crisis” in Catholic studies, however, the ambiguity of “the priest” has made for easy trafficking between the categories of “Catholic studies” and “Catholicism” that has authorized and entrenched normative classificatory schemes, stabilizing rather than destabilizing. The presence of priests in the genealogy of Catholic studies holds Catholic studies to normative framings of Catholicism, gender, and sexuality; the closeness of the priest to Catholic studies has neutralized the oddity. To put it briefly, what is “queer” can also stabilize what is “normal.” The challenge moving forward is to ask how the ambiguities of queer sacramental forms become deployed as normativizing and stabilizing structures within religious studies scholarship through the admixture of religious and scholarly authority.