Sacramental Justice as Queer Sacramentality

What would a queer Catholic sacramentality look like? “Queer” can be understood to signify a self-conscious, critical, and possibly subversive relation to processes of normalization (and therefore of legitimation and its attendant privileges) whether those processes pertain to sexuality, gender, race, religion, and/or class and whether they are sanctioned by the state, political economy, and/or religious institutions. Sacramentality pertains to the sacredness of creation; that is, the capacity of creation to reveal or to provide access to the divine. Andrew Greely offers a capacious vision of (Roman) Catholic sacramentality in his well-known work, The Catholic Imagination. In addition to the seven “official” sacraments (administered by or at least witnessed by clergy), Greely points to God’s co-called “Mother Love” and priests as sacraments and insists that for (Roman) Catholics all created reality is a sacrament. It would seem, then, that there is no limit as to what might qualify as sacramental. Indeed, critiquing the Roman hierarchy’s culture of shame surrounding sex, Greely asserts that sex is a Sacrament (with a capital “s”); relatedly, he muses, “As if one can walk along Michigan Avenue on a spring day and not experience sexual desire. Or sit on a beach. Or swim in a public pool.” In this reading, sacraments are not the purview of ordained male clergy and are not restricted to certain ritualized times and spaces. Greely’s sacramentality is ambient and serendipitous. One might be tempted to see in Greely the outlines of a “queer sacramentality.” But Greely pulls back and tethers his account to the familiar parameters of the normal. In discussing sex his only reference points are heterosexual, and mostly marital, couplings and he warns about the consequences of an excessive sacramentality, cautioning his readers that “Catholicism, because of the very richness of its sacramentality, must always face the risk of slipping into superstition, folk religion, and paganism.” But what, really, is worrisome about these three possibilities? Do they signal a runaway populism? A too common, and not sufficiently Roman, Catholicism?

I suggest that a truly queer sacramentality is evident in the informal Eucharistic theology and practices of some of the small and largely invisible independent Catholic churches that dot the US landscape. This theology and its attendant practices reflect their commitment to “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. Their thinking and practices are what Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh has referred to as the “alternative disciplines, imaginations, or performances” that arise out the Eucharist’s “different kind of politics.”  So, too, they may be viewed as a fitting response to Linn Tonstad ‘s concern (citing an earlier essay by Janet Jakobsen) that queer theory’s position of antinormativity or resistance to the normative is not truly liberatory but is easily absorbed by the complexities of the “normal.” In other words, they reflect a queer politics predicted not on integration into dominant institutions, but instead on the pursuit of “a political agenda that seeks to change values, definitions, and laws which make these institutions and relationships oppressive.” Put another way, theirs is a vision captured by José Muñoz’s description of queer thought as picturing “arduous modes of relationality that persist in the world despite stratifying demarcations and taxonomies of being . . . and on the denigrating of any expansive idea of the common and commonism.”

In what follows, I draw from an ongoing ethnographic account of select independent US Catholic churches to illuminate key aspects of their queer sacramentality, the hallmark of which is their commitment to sacramental justice. I maintain that the key aspects of their sacramental justice are nondiscriminatory ordination, radical hospitality, and promiscuous ecumenism. I elaborate on these key aspects and conclude by 1) proffering sacramental justice as a critical and politicalized queer practice exemplifying a “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.”

The US independent Catholics I have studied provide unrestricted access to the Eucharist both in terms of who consecrates it and who receives it. In the first instance, they practice nondiscriminatory ordination and, in the second, radical hospitality at the Eucharistic table. What nondiscriminatory ordination looks like in practice is that anyone—regardless of gender, sexuality, relationship or marital status, race, religious background, or type of theological education—may serve a community as a priest or bishop, so long as they are elected to do so by parishioners and fellow clergy. The necessity for election by parishioners reveals a conception of power as shared and accountable to all members; this is not a church of sinful lay persons in need of the salvific mediation of a celibate caste. To explain the biblical basis and political implications of their practice of sacramental justice, Bishop Rosemary of the Old Catholic Communion points not to the typical biblical scene of the intimate space of the male-dominated so-called “Last Supper,” but to the crowds gathered around Jesus as he teaches in his open-air, mobile ministry. Of this scene, she observes:

Jesus fed five thousand persons. He didn’t check IDs. He broke open the bread and shared it, no questions asked. Like Jesus, I am not going to turn anyone away from my table. . . . Humans are made in the image of God; this is the sole criterion of their being invited to this communal meal. Sacramental Justice is not simply a matter of access to the bread of life, it is also a vision of a world without exclusion and without scarcity. It is a vision of life and love in abundance.

I suggest that Independent Catholics exemplify an alternative Eucharistic politics that seeks to correct the oppressive exclusions currently practiced by Rome. In so doing, they address what Rosemary Radford Reuther, among others, has referred to as a “Eucharistic famine” (attributable to a shortage of priests) and counter what Massimo Faggioli has referred to as the “weaponization of the sacraments” by which he means the exclusion of persons from receiving sacraments.