Sexuality and Mourning in American Catholicism 

It's not exactly breaking news that religious groups in the United States get het up over sex and gender. If it's not abortion, it's abstinence education, or stem-cell research, or gay marriage that gets them going. And while church people carry these concerns into the pubic square, they also fight about them with one another, and sometimes ferociously.

Take my own ecclesial tribe, the Roman Catholics. Now Catholics and sex have been in the news a great deal since 2002, when The Boston Globe "broke" the story about the sex abuse of children by Catholic priests in Boston and elsewhere. But American Catholics have been fighting over sexual issues steadily since at least 1968, when the Vatican reaffirmed its condemnation of artificial contraception. Since then it's been gloves off, not just for the Catholic bishops, but for many Catholic laypeople as well, on both ends of the political spectrum.

By observing this I don't mean to suggest that the individual sex/gender issues American Catholics get exercised about aren't significant; I myself have been fighting for the ordination of Catholic women for thirty-five years. But if you consider the American Catholic culture wars overall—as from a hovercraft, so to speak—it does seem that there's something, shall we say, excessive about them. So what's up?

In this article I draw on my recent book Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism to share some of the insights gained during a decade of researching this question. In doing so, I consider the scholarly conversation about "mourning and the inability to mourn" which, in recent years, has become increasingly prominent in the study of religion. Fundamental to this conversation is the assumption that engaging or working through loss is so painful that human beings (and groups) undertake massive defenses to avoid it. They become enraged, they become depressed, they get stuck and repeat the same actions over and over. The cost of this "inability to mourn" is very high.

Using this conversation as a framework for my analysis, I suggest that at the beginning of the 1960s, post-immigrant, white-ethnic American Catholics were on the verge of achieving the idealized way of life their immigrant forebears had struggled to attain. (More than 10 million Catholics, most of them poor, had emigrated to the United States between 1820 and 1920). Many of us were also convinced that with the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the democratic vision of the church we favored, was going to triumph. Yet by the end of the decade, the "American dream" had exploded into social conflict—the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, the sexual revolution—and the Vatican was opposing to a greater and greater degree the liberalization of the church that many of us anticipated. Then came the economic downturn of the 1970s and the Vatican refusal of women's ordination. Our losses were enormous.

Yet many American Catholics did not engage and work through these losses. Instead, we threw ourselves into the Catholic culture wars. Central to this development was the increasing emphasis placed by the Vatican on sex and gender prohibition. In truth, the Vatican had been focusing more and more on abortion and contraception since its massive losses in the liberal democratic revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century.

But after Vatican II this emphasis on sexual prohibition became even more pronounced. Sexual prohibition virtually replaced doctrine as the heart of the Catholic faith. And although the governance structure after Vatican II remained monarchical, so that the laity, the clergy, and even to some extent the bishops have minimal impact on what the Vatican does, many of us Catholics have spent much of our lives fighting against (or for) Catholic mandates on sexuality and gender. These struggles have protected us from mourning our enormous losses.

In Tracing the Sign of the Cross I go beyond this American Catholic "inability to mourn," to chart what I believe to be a path toward a more productive and faithful future for the church I love. I do this by drawing on fiction, memoirs, and essays by a number of contemporary American writers with distinctively Catholic imaginations, showing the ways in which these writers sometimes resist but increasingly engage the losses of recent years.

The work of novelist and journalist James Carroll forms the basis for my exploration. Carroll's critiques of the church in books like Constantine's Sword and his award winning memoir An American Requiem, as well as in magazines and newspaper articles, would seem to embody exactly the kind of engagement with loss that points toward a better future. But if we read Carroll's criticisms of the church in tandem with his nine novels, a highly gendered pattern of resistance to such mourning begins to appear.

Symptomatic of this resistance is the repeated appearance in Carroll’s novels of a structure in which two male characters-—very often priests, seminarians, or other white-ethnic Catholic men—struggle for control of a third, weaker, feminine figure. In Carroll's novel Prince of Peace, for example, Michael Maguire, a priest, has an affair with and marries a former nun, who had until then been married to his best friend. And in The City Below the protagonist Nick Mullen marries his brother Terry’s girlfriend when Terry leaves for the seminary, then seduces the beautiful upper-class woman his brother married after he left the seminary.

As the critic Eve Sedgwick has noted, the intense bonds between male rivals in this kind of erotic triangle have more impact on the outcome of the story than anything that goes on between either of the rivals and the woman they're fighting over. Intermittent homophobic statements by Carroll's heroes distract us from the intensity of these bonds. Equally to the point, the bonds between the two male rivals enable them to control the feminized third figure in the triangle. This triumph of control is symbolized by a conquering Christ figure who appears again and again in Carroll's writing, whether in the person of Carroll's dear fellow-seminarian Patrick Hughes, who skated so fast ahead of a crack in the ice that Carroll compares him to Jesus walking on water, or his ex-priest fictional hero Michael Maguire, who defeats the vengeful Catholic archbishop of New York by being buried from the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine to the acclaim of thousands.

Fantasized conquests by these heroes hold at bay the losses piling up during the period these books were being written, including the decline of the American industrial economy and the white ethnic church. And this structure really does address Catholicism, even if Carroll's characters are fictional. Consider, for example, Carroll's non-fiction article about Vatican complicity in the Holocaust that appeared in The New Yorker in 1997. In it Carroll describes his meeting with liberal German theologian Hans Küng. Over champagne, they agree that in its treatment of Jews as well as its refusal to ordain women, the Vatican is an arrogant institution defending its interests at the expense of others. Many may agree. But note that Carroll and Küng are fighting the Vatican here over not one but two feminized figures—the Jews and womem—much as the priest-hero and his brother or friend compete for prized females in Carroll’s novels. Why should American Catholics mourn their losses when fighting the bad guys is much more absorbing?

A similar Catholic “inability to mourn” marks the early works of the novelist Mary Gordon and the gay Hispanic essayist and television commentator Richard Rodriguez. Initially, virtually all Gordon characters are Irish Catholics, while the church, for Gordon, is the impermeable bedrock of the Baltimore catechism. But by the 1990s figures of the sexual and racial other begin to appear within representations of Catholicism in Gordon’s work and as her characters begin to mourn. This bedrock church is reconfigured.

In her 1996 memoir The Shadow Man, for example, Gordon investigates her long-dead father who functioned for her as the embodiment of the bedrock pre-Vatican II church. In the process she confronts abject secrets about him, a Jewish convert who was in fact an anti-Semite and pornographer who had lied repeatedly about his former life. And as Gordon confronts and grieves these truths, the bedrock church of her earlier fiction becomes "flowers, and dirt, and a few stones." She then peoples her 1993 collection of novellas, The Rest of Life, with a series of non-Irish protagonists. In one of them, Paola Smaldone journeys back to Italy to confront painful repressed memories and later celebrates her new life in a joyful Eucharistic hymn.

Even more striking is the new vision of Catholicism in the work of the gay, Hispanic essayist and television commentator Richard Rodriguez. Earlier in his career Rodriguez was very much the political and religious conservative. In his first collection of writing, Hunger of Memory, pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism defends Rodriguez from the loss of family intimacy that accompanied his assimilation into Anglo culture. His scorn for the changes in this beloved church wrought by Vatican II is palpable.

But by Rodriguez's second collection of essays in 1992, things are changing. This is especially apparent in “Late Victorians,” where Rodriguez revises his understanding of Catholicism in light of his own gayness and the death to AIDS of his dear friend César. In the face of César’s agony and that of so many other gay men in 1980s San Francisco, the once-conservative Rodriguez realizes that a new Catholic community is gathering over that city much as one gathered after the death of Jesus.

This revision of Catholicism underpins the brilliant reconfiguration of American racial and cultural identity in Rodriguez's 2002 autobiographical meditation Brown: The Last Discovery of America. Initially Brown seems concerned only with the race of the Latino and other immigrant populations now transforming the face of America. But Rodriguez's engagement of race undermines a wide range of other social divisions: documented vs. undocumented, gay vs. straight, male vs. female. “Brown," he writes, "not in the sense of pigment, necessarily, but brown because mixed, confused, lumped, impure, unpasteurized, as motives are mixed, and the fluids of generation are mixed and emotions are unclear, and the tally of human progress and failure in every generation is mixed, and unaccounted for, missing in plain sight…”

Catholicism, with its seemingly clear division between purity and impurity, is another of the subjects Rodriguez reconceives in Brown. When questioned about his oxymoronic self-identification, “gay Catholic,” Rodriguez assures the inquirer that, at least initially, being Catholic was no more a choice than being gay. What enabled him to sustain this tug of war all these years, this "brown paradox," is the crucifix. From the beginning, Rodriguez tells his readers, the crucifix was omnipresent. And even today despite his rage over the church’s "primitive sexual orthodoxies," Rodriguez “does not wish to live beyond a crucifix.” Because of the understanding of mourning inscribed there, a whole range of apparent contradictions can be sustained.

In the conclusion to Tracing the Sign of the Cross, I use my own history as an American Catholic to weave these insights together. As a Catholic teenager in the 1960s, I found the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the calling of Vatican Council II the most exciting things that had ever happened. In response I studied theology and religion and became involved in various Catholic lay organizations.

Soon, though, things were falling apart. The Vatican dismissal of women's ordination in 1976 was especially devastating for me. I postponed dealing with much of it by throwing myself into the women's movement in the church, teaching, lecturing, and publishing about feminist theology and spirituality. But by the mid-1980s, I was having new problems, this time with the very feminism I'd adopted to hold my losses at bay. Much of it had to do with my working class background. I wasn't alone in questioning feminism, of course; African American women were doing so as well. I returned to school to sort some of this out, and it was there that I encountered the scholarly conversation about mourning and my friends Carroll, Gordon, and Rodriguez.

Engagement with the American Catholic losses of the late twentieth century has led me, personally, to a new commitment to the church's work in the developing world, especially in Africa. But I am also hoping that my research will stimulate conversations about loss and an accompanying renewal among American Catholics, and perhaps among others involved in the sex/gender wars as well. What about you?

Marian Ronan is Research Professor of Catholic Studies in the Center for World Christianity at New York Theological Seminary in New York City. A scholar and writer, she specializes in contemporary Roman Catholicism. Her book Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism was published by Columbia University Press, Gender, Theory and Religion Series in 2009.