As the other articles in this roundtable suggest, Catholics in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century were able to draw upon a long tradition of lay involvement in various lay apostolates, the renewed teaching on the role of the laity proclaimed at the Second Vatican Council, and the worldwide presence of forms of international lay organizations, including Pax Romana and Catholic student movements. Additional contributions to this discussion could easily include some of the other official and institutionalized forms of lay involvement that proliferated in the twentieth century—the rise of various new ecclesial movements such as Opus Dei, Focolare, and the Communità Sant'Egidio; the Catholic Family movement and other forms of lay-led renewal at the national and parish level that pursued the conciliar vision of the universal call to holiness with enthusiasm and persistence; the entry of thousands of laypeople into ministries and teaching roles previously restricted, in practice if not always in statute, to the ordained and to members of religious communities; and the particular roles of lay Catholics with historically oppressed or marginalized racial and ethnic identities in finding a voice in postconciliar Catholicism.
At the same time, however, lay Catholics in the United States and beyond have been co-creating the church in other ways, either unrecognized within wider Roman Catholic institutions and organizations or at times actively marginalized within those institutions. And yet, these more fractured forms of ecclesial participation are also important sources for a theology of participatory ecclesiology and the co-creation of the church. This contribution to the roundtable looks particularly at the experience of lay LGBTQ+Footnote 135 Catholics in the United States in the last fifty years as one particular case study of lay Catholics co-creating the church that raises substantive issues not only, or even primarily, with regard to sexual ethics, but also about the church. The active presence of faithful, organized lay LGBTQ+ Catholics in the church complicates, and perhaps shows room for development, in our theologies of tradition in the church, in our idea of ecclesial leaders and magisterial authority in relation to lay Catholics and the sense of the faithful, and in our appreciation of the possibilities and limits of doctrinal development within a pilgrim church. This article begins by outlining in a very summary fashion some of the history of LGBTQ+ Catholics in the United States, and then highlights two ecclesiological consequences for theologies of the role of lay Catholics in the church that this history seems to suggest.
LGBTQ+ Catholics in the United States
The full history of LGBTQ+ Catholics in the United States in the past fifty years is, in many ways, a story that still needs to be fully told, if such a thing is possible. The very diversity and complexity of that history, even prescinding from other times and places, makes such a full summary beyond the scope this article, particularly if one is attempting to tell the story from a variety of perspectives and identities, and not simply a dominant narrative. There is a large and growing bibliography of work on particular places and moments in that history, however. There are excellent case studies of particular institutions that open a window onto a piece of this history. Donal Godfrey's study of Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Parish in the Castro neighborhood of San FranciscoFootnote 136 and Jeffrey Burns’ article “Beyond the Immigrant Church: Gays and Lesbians and the Catholic Church in San Francisco”Footnote 137 both focus upon histories of LGBTQ+ Catholics, and especially of gay men, in that city. A significant dissertation by Howell Williams, sadly not yet more widely accessible, focused upon the history of New Ways Ministry, the Catholic ministry founded by pioneering pastoral workers and activists Rev. Robert Nugent and Sr. Jeannine Gramick.Footnote 138 Historian Thomas Rzeznik and journalist Michael O'Loughlin both look particularly at the impact of AIDS upon Catholics and the mixed institutional responses to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote 139 Additional important historical studies include biographical and autobiographical texts,Footnote 140 as well as analyses of such texts that situate them as vital examples of narrative theology, as in the work of Dugan McGinley.Footnote 141 Individual ministries and institutions also maintain narratives of their own histories and saintly founders, often accessible via their websites.Footnote 142 As with much of the story most often told about LGBTQ+ Catholic history, it should also be noted once more for clarity both how important so many of these sources are, and yet how much published material centers white and gay male Catholic voices.
What can we learn from this complex history, even if only in broad strokes, that helps us better understand lay co-creation of the Body of Christ? First, and perhaps most striking to me, as someone who has lived some of this history and got to witness it firsthand as an undergraduate intern at New Ways Ministry in the late 1990s, was how dramatically the conversation around LGBTQ+ Catholics has changed in the past fifty years, and not only in the more recent past. An initial periodization of the history of LGBTQ+ Catholics in the postconciliar period would include three relatively distinct moments. First, we find a tentative and yet robust series of conversations and organization in tandem with the beginnings of a wider lesbian and gay rights movement in the early 1970s, including the founding of chapters of Dignity beginning in 1969–1970,Footnote 143 the publication of John McNeill's The Church and the Homosexual,Footnote 144 and then the founding of New Ways Ministry in 1977. Looking back at this period even from 2022, it is striking how, despite the very real fact of suspicion and pushback at many levels, how open Catholic leaders and institutions were to these nascent ministries for LGBTQ+ Catholics. For example, Dignity chapters around the country were often founded with the approval and participation of local Catholic clergy, and representatives from DignityUSA were officially invited to participate in the 1976 Call to Action meeting in Detroit. Associations of priests and of women and men religious put forth calls for nondiscrimination, and in 1980 the Association of Priests of the Archdiocese of Chicago honored Dignity as its “Association of the Year”!Footnote 145 And so part of the undertold story of LGBTQ+ Catholics in the United States must include this early period of dialogue and even welcome.
It proved to be a false springtime. Symbolically, we could date the end of this first period to a very specific date, October 31, 1986. Around that date, in the middle of one of the darkest moments of the early AIDS epidemic, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released its “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.”Footnote 146 Responding to the activism and organization that preceded it, it stated that “increasing numbers of people today, even within the Church, are bringing enormous pressure to bear on the Church to accept the homosexual condition as though it were not disordered and to condone homosexual activity” (§8). In response to that, the letter forcefully restated Catholic teaching that “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder” (§3). Most problematically for many of the nascent forms of ministry with and for LGBTQ+ Catholics, the CDF document instructed Catholic bishops to distance Catholic institutions in their dioceses from organizations like Dignity and New Ways Ministry, and from pastoral care “in which homosexual persons associate with each other without clearly stating that homosexual activity is immoral” (§15). In a paragraph that effectively led to the end of a period of cooperation between LGBTQ+ Catholics and many Catholic parishes and institutions, the letter states:
All support should be withdrawn from any organizations which seek to undermine the teaching of the Church, which are ambiguous about it, or which neglect it entirely. Such support, or even the semblance of such support, can be gravely misinterpreted. Special attention should be given to the practice of scheduling religious services and to the use of Church buildings by these groups, including the facilities of Catholic schools and colleges. To some, such permission to use Church property may seem only just and charitable; but in reality it is contradictory to the purpose for which these institutions were founded, it is misleading and often scandalous. (§17)
As poignantly reported most recently by Michael O'Loughlin, this letter pushed LGBTQ+ Catholic groups out of their spiritual and institutional homes just as HIV/AIDS was sweeping through their communities with devastating results.Footnote 147 Just as many of their friends and partners were dying of AIDS, often in a matter of weeks or months after the onset of symptoms, Dignity chapters were expelled from churches and Catholic college campuses, investigations were launched into LGBTQ+ ministries, and, for many lay Catholics, this moment led to a definitive break with the Catholic Church. “When we were asked to leave the parish” of St. Francis Xavier in New York City, one of O'Loughlin's major sources, David Pais, said, “I felt like I was being thrown out of my home.”Footnote 148
This second period of development of LGBTQ+ Catholic identity in the United States was marked, then, by an almost-entirely lay-led movement. There were, of course, prominent clergy and religious who continued their previous ministry and activism, often at great personal cost. These include Fr. John McNeill, expelled from the Society of Jesus in 1987;Footnote 149 Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit; Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Fr. Robert Nugent of New Ways Ministry, later individually condemned by the CDF for “the promotion of errors and ambiguities” in their ministry;Footnote 150 moral theologian Fr. Charles Curran; and thousands of anonymous clergy and religious who, often at personal risk, ministered to LGBTQ+ Catholics by presiding at Masses for Dignity and providing pastoral care to Catholics in same-gender relationships. I cannot also fail to mention LGBTQ+ clergy and religious themselves, whose work and witness within their parishes, religious communities, schools, and other institutions is another important piece of this complex history;Footnote 151 and the prevalence of homosexuality across a wide spectrum of self-acceptance to self-loathing among Catholic clergy further complicated and complicates these dynamics.
But when the possibilities for cooperation between lay LGBTQ+ Catholics who dissented in word and choice from Catholic teaching on same-sex sexual activity and institutional church leaders became impossible in many ways and places, those lay Catholics co-created forms of Catholic identity and even evangelization that, ironically, might have remained more clerically focused had the 1986 letter not been released. LGBTQ+ Catholics organized weekly worship; created forms of pastoral care for persons living with HIV/AIDS and for those in mourning; sponsored outreach and support for LGBTQ+ youth, especially homeless youth; led Bible studies, prayer groups, and even the more “traditional” Catholic activities of bingo nights and St. Joseph's Dinners to support themselves and their wider communities.
One representative example from this period is the Catholic lay leader Nickie Valdez of San Antonio.Footnote 152 Valdez, who died in late 2020 at the age of eighty, was a primary leader in the LGBTQ+ Catholic community in San Antonio and in the United States as a whole, while also contributing to the wider Catholic community in numerous ways as a peace and antiracism activist. Beginning in the 1960s, Valdez helped create a home for LGBTQ+ Catholics through Dignity San Antonio, and doing so in such a way that maintained a home for Dignity to meet in Catholic churches longer past 1986 than in most other places in the country. As a lesbian and Tejana woman, she also directly challenged forms of misogyny and patriarchy, and racism and discrimination, within the LGBTQ+ Catholic community. As Jason Steidl states, “She felt the pain of exclusion and worked to build communities where no one was left out.”Footnote 153 Stories of LGBTQ+ Catholic holiness like that of Nickie Valdez remain undertold and often localized, like saints honored only in a home diocese before universal canonization; the recovery of these stories, especially of their heroic love for a church actively working to exclude them in this period, remains a key task of a recovery of the history of this second period.
Although local conditions and life under particular bishops, pastors, and other leaders varied across this period, we can now point to the beginning of a third, and continuing, period of LGBTQ+ Catholic identity in the United States. One milestone that might mark this new situation is a famous comment from early in the papacy of Pope Francis, when the pope responded to a press question about a “gay lobby” in the Vatican with the response, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”Footnote 154 The specificity of that response in relation to gay clergy and not LGBTQ+ Catholics more broadly, Pope Francis’ continued opposition to same-sex marriage, his restraint in relation to church teaching on same-sex sexual activity, and his invocation of “gender ideology” in relation to gender identity, all prevent any snap judgment that the pope supports a major change in Catholic teaching or fully embraces all of the issues of concern to many LGBTQ+ Catholics.Footnote 155
Nevertheless, the change in tone of the pope's response from the past twenty-five years, as well as some of the more concrete actions he has taken, such as the restoration to active ministry of gay priest and theologian Fr. James AlisonFootnote 156 or more recent correspondence with and endorsement of the ministry of Sr. Jeannine Gramick,Footnote 157 have reopened a more direct dialogue and cooperation between lay LGBTQ+ Catholics and the institutional Catholic Church. In the United States, Fr. James Martin, SJ, beginning with a response to the then-largest mass shooting in US history at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, and continuing with the publication of his book Building a Bridge in 2017,Footnote 158 has been the most prominent ordained Catholic leader in decades to further a change in tone in Catholic conversation around LGBTQ+ Catholics, obviously in step with the changes and greater acceptance found in the US context at all levels, including many Catholics.Footnote 159 At the same time, many of the institutionalized forms of distinctly lay-led LGBTQ+ Catholic institutions and ministries have seen a decline in numbers as more and more mainstream Catholic parishes and other institutions have become increasingly welcoming spaces for LGBTQ+ Catholics, despite great differences between geographical and institutional locations.
While this change in tone and the developments of greater dialogue and qualified welcome that have occurred as a result of that change are in the main to be welcomed, it must be pointed out that the current moment has a bit of a “back to the future” feel—returning to some of the initiatives and extended hands of dialogue that first arose in the 1970s. Much of what Pope Francis or James Martin have said about LGBTQ+ Catholics would have been (relatively) uncontroversial in the first period of this history. One major difference, however, with implications for an ecclesiological analysis, is the change that occurred in wider US society over these decades. In the first period of LGBTQ+ Catholic dialogue in the United States, many of the leaders of these initiatives, clerical, religious, and lay, saw themselves on a vanguard of liberative, justice-focused action, in ways that challenged both the church and wider civil society. As in related movements for racial and gender justice, they envisioned a church that was speaking prophetically not only to its own members, but to the world that they were trying to change, in a period when rights for LGBTQ+ people were precarious, at best, in this country, and when goals like nondiscrimination laws and marriage equality were only barely on the horizon. But since Catholic Church leaders have returned to a more open and inclusive dialogue on LGBTQ+ issues, the world outside of the church has changed dramatically. Institutional dialogue initiatives are no longer at the vanguard, but instead seem to be catching up to a society that, not without notable and substantive exceptions, has moved rapidly and dramatically in its acceptance of LGBTQ+ people and relationships.
This situation is further complexified by the reality of significant numbers of clergy who, depending upon the very definitions of identity and terminology that are at issue, are gay or bisexual men themselves. As theologians Mark Jordan and James Alison have repeatedly outlined, the reality of gay clergy, on a wide spectrum from self-accepting to self-loathing, has further prevented, subverted, or warped, even unintentionally, a long overdue, church-wide conversation on LGBTQ+ issues. As Jordan writes, “A subject that Catholic theologians cannot discuss during centuries except with thunder, derision, or disgust is not a subject on which Catholic theology is ready to speak.”Footnote 160
Ecclesiological Implications
To begin to speak of the implications of this experience for a theology of lay Catholics’ co-creation of the church, this experience of marginalization and exile allows, through examination of lay Catholic lives of faith lived apart from the mainstream Catholic Church, an exploration of some of the main themes necessary for such a theology. When the institutional Catholic Church withdrew from a prophetic, evangelical, or liberative role in relation to LGBTQ+ people, lay Catholics, both LGBTQ+ and allies, took up that mantle and co-created communities and grass-roots structures that modeled a form of lay-led Catholicism implied by a theology of baptismal vocation. They were not unique in this; other historically marginalized Catholics in the United States (Black Catholics, Hispanic Catholic, Native American and Indigenous Catholics, Catholics with disabilities, and more) have long known that they could count on themselves and the resources in their own communities more than the dominant voices and powers of Catholic institutions, and the conciliar emphasis upon the commissioning of all the baptized and the universal call to holiness provided new energies and starting points for many communities in the years following Vatican II.
What does make the LGBTQ+ Catholic experience interestingly unique, however, is that these movements co-created ways of being Catholic not merely out of neglect or marginalization by mainstream Catholic institutions, but in self-conscious opposition to them, especially during the height of the AIDS crisis and the fallout from the 1986 CDF letter. Because of this contrast, lay LGBTQ+ Catholics provide a powerful example of forms of lay Catholic co-creation of the church, where some of the ambiguities of other forms of institutional collaboration are missing due to the stark absence of clerical involvement in many aspects of LGBTQ+ Catholic experience.
I want to conclude this article by highlighting two ecclesiological consequences for theologies of the laity in relation to church leaders and to the role of the sense of the faithful in the tradition of the church that are unveiled by LGBTQ+ Catholic experience.
By creating forms of Catholic life and fidelity not only independent from official Catholic teaching and mainstream Catholic institutions, LGBTQ+ Catholics over the past five decades exemplify some of the themes raised elsewhere in this roundtable: the idea of an “adult” Catholicism, of empowered Catholics commissioned by their baptism to create community, foster discipleship, perform corporal and spiritual acts of mercy, and to be the Body of Christ in the world. In addition, particularly if taking into account the process of Catholic leaders beginning to listen, once again, to the experiences of LGBTQ+ Catholics and to their narratives of faith, we might find a clear example of the wider church learning something new from its lay members. Instead of dividing the church between the ecclesia docens and the ecclesia discens, the “teaching church” and the “listening church,” the experience of wider ecclesial attention to LGBTQ+ Catholics provides a concrete example where lay LGBTQ+ Catholics, and other lay Catholics who have already learned from their LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters, are teaching church leaders new ways of thinking about sexuality and gender. If, as Richard Gaillardetz suggests, bishops must be learners as well as teachers if they are going to exercise their teaching ministry well,Footnote 161 they will need to listen more attentively to the lived narrative ecclesiology of LGBTQ+ Catholic history, even in the service of the preservation of distinct teachings on the exercise of sexuality in different forms and contexts. And, even given the clarity of the contrast, such listening helps to exemplify the fact that lay co-creation of the church is not an entire novum in the life of the church but has been and will continue to be a continuing part of ecclesial life. This is of significance not only for our investigations of past Catholic history, but for thinking through what structures, theologies of ministry, and understandings of the relation between the ordination and the baptismal commission of all the faithful will best serve the ways in which the Holy Spirit may be speaking with and to the churches.
This raises further questions for the relation of the church and the sense of the faith in relation to church tradition.Footnote 162 From any evaluation of ecclesial tradition, it is difficult to see the changes in attitudes toward LGBTQ+ Catholics and toward same-gender relationships as an organic development from previous Catholic teaching. Like major changes in church teaching around the church's attitude toward other Christians, Judaism, and other religious traditions, or on moral issues such as slavery or the death penalty, any doctrinal changes regarding same-sex sexual activity or LGBTQ+ Catholics more broadly could only be approached, at best, as what John Thiel names “dramatic development” as a sense of tradition: “a movement of tradition in which the story of the Holy Spirit at work in the church moves in a direction utterly unanticipated in light of accustomed narrative expectations.”Footnote 163 Another possible theological category with which to name such a break in traditional teaching might be Lieven Boeve's eschatologically shaded concept of “interruption,” in which God's interruption of a closed or static understanding of tradition can be, at the same time, a moment of crisis and a moment of grace.Footnote 164 In either case, given the short period in which LGBTQ+ Catholics have just begun to tell their stories and the wider church has just begun to process what “the gay thing,” in James Alison's language,Footnote 165 might mean for the wider church, the collective ecclesial evaluation of the character of such a dramatic development or interruption has also only just begun.
But it seems crucially important to note that, especially when many clergy were prevented from continuing dialogical or welcoming ministries, it has been primarily lay Catholics who have been doing the interrupting. That raises major questions for the way we conceive the relation between those teaching and those taught in the church, if such a stark division ever made sense; it also raises significant questions for how we organize ecclesial structures and provide spaces for dialogue in which different forms of teaching and learning can occur, and in which the living tradition of the past, given voice by the church's authoritative teachers, can be brought into conversation with the living faith of the present, often given voice in the lives of lay Catholics. It gives me some hope that the beginning of a church-wide Synod on Synodality, gathered under the themes “communion, participation, mission,” might provide further space for recovering the forms of dialogue, lay initiative, and openness to divine interruption to which the experience of LGBTQ+ Catholics stands witness.
Roundtable Conclusion
The complementary articles in this theological roundtable, taken together, highlight some of the movements of communal bodies and voices, working together, to claim full inclusion in the Catholic Church. The dynamism and development of the church is made visible, as is the development of ecclesiology and doctrine that flows out of—and might flow further, in that which is not yet here—in these movements that all respond to pressing social and cultural needs. These collaborative transformations, official development of ordained magisterial structures to address poverty and economic crises (Yount), student communities advocating for change and participatory inclusion (Ahern), and lay adult social action communities for racial justice (Rademacher) and—building on the experience of lay LGBTQ+ Catholics—to demand ecclesial participation (Flanagan), form the foundation for what is to come, from the inclusive ministerial adaptations in Pope Francis’ 2021 documents Spiritus Domini and Antiquum Ministerium to the development of structures of participation of LGBTQI+ Catholics.
