During my last two sessions with my therapist, we’ve talked a lot about my history with the Catholic religion. I was raised Catholic, and went to Catholic school all my life, including the brief stint I did in graduate school at Ursuline College. I have seen so many versions of what it means to be Catholic in my life, it would be hard to describe them all. I’ve encountered people who think (and teach) that “Catholic” means traditional, patriarchal, clerical, conservative, and upholding power structures. I’ve met other people who think (and teach) that “Catholic” means revolutionary, radical, social-justice oriented, progressive, socialist, and tearing down power structures. There are truly as many ways to be Catholic as there are Catholic people.
The version of Catholicism I grew up with was very much the first kind I mentioned - traditional, conservative, and clerical. When I was a kid, Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” was what all of the parents and teachers in my church and school were talking about. I’m not going to summarize what “Theology of the Body” taught (you can click on that Wikipedia link if you’d like), but the way it was interpreted by people around me was that it placed extreme expectations and restrictions on human sexuality under the guise of being forward-thinking. The frequent conversations by the conservative, charismatic Catholics that my parents socialized with about “Theology of the Body” had a big influence on me as I was coming to understand myself.
The version of Catholicism I grew up with also had some ideas that pre-dated “Theology of the Body”. Men did these things, and women did these other things. Eucharistic adoration was common practice at my parish - in fact, we had an Adoration Chapel that the priests in charge set an expectation for: someone (volunteers from the community) had to be there at all times - the Eucharist could not be unattended. My Catholic upbringing also focused a lot on the Rosary - in fact, my family prayed the Rosary on every road trip. And abortion was considered the most heinous, evil, Satanic thing that ever came into existence. I remember once seeing a rosary in which each bead had a plastic fetus on the inside of it. So … yeah …
The version of Catholicism I encountered in high school was wildly different from the version I grew up with prior to that. Both my high school and college were Jesuit schools, where education, the Spiritual Exercises, community service, and social justice were the focus. I LOVED the Jesuits. One of the first people I came out to at the age of 15 was a Jesuit priest, who was so incredibly loving, compassionate, kind, supportive, and nurturing, that I couldn’t have asked for a better experience for a young queer kid to have with an authority figure. I went on a lot of retreats in high school, and eventually became a retreat leader. I was a Eucharistic minister at the masses at my high school, I was extremely involved in Campus Ministry, my friends called me The Church Lady (referencing the old SNL skit), and I was voted “Most Likely to Become a Jesuit” in my senior year yearbook.
My whole life until college, I was convinced that the old Christian/Catholic teaching about the separation of the soul and body was fundamental Truth. “The soul is of God, the body is of the earth,” meaning every instinct and urge and physical thing came from a basic, godless state, and that the only “holy” things were prayer, service, and rejecting the urges of the body. My thoughts on separation of soul and body became almost pathological - I truly believed anything my body was telling me to do was “evil”, especially since my body was telling me I was queer, which was - in no uncertain terms - against God.
I’m not going to rehash my coming out experience - in fact, you’ll probably never see me describe my initial coming out experience on this blog. Let’s just leave it at “it wasn’t good” and move on from there. But the important detail for this story is that I came out at the end of high school, and so I started college as an openly gay person, who had just had Catholic teachings used against me. My mind was wild, and I chose to actively reject everything I believed before, including the “evilness” of the body.
Despite wanting to reject what I had been taught, I was still very involved in Campus Ministry in college. I would get together once a week with other college kids in the chapel at our school to pray and talk about faith in what was called “Christian Life Communities”. I continued to go on a lot of retreats. I continued to be a Eucharistic minister.
My college’s atmosphere was even more radically different from the version of Catholicism I grew up with. The person who became my mentor and most trusted support was a Jesuit priest who was openly gay (and celibate). It’s risky to be openly gay (and celibate) as a Catholic priest now, in 2024, so you can imagine how risky it was in 2003. This priest was my art professor, and helped me to truly grow my artistic side. He was loving, kind, funny, smart, quirky, and deeply spiritual. Russ and I just recently talked to him on Zoom, and he is still an amazing person.
I recently told my therapist that if I thought of my identity as a stool in college, it had 3 equally important legs - punk rock, Catholicism, and being gay. I got so into pop-punk, punk, and emo music that it became central to how I thought of myself. Being openly gay allowed me to express myself in a way that I didn’t know I was capable of.
But as much as I loved being the good Catholic boy growing up, and as much as I loved being the Church Lady in high school, I equally loved being Catholic in a completely new way in college. Our Campus Ministry department worked with the students to create a retreat specifically for LGBTQ+ students (dreamt up and created by my now-husband Russ). Being gay and being Catholic were not even remotely opposed to each other in the eyes of most of my college community. Heck, I met Russ in our shared Campus Ministry activities. We went to school sponsored dances as a couple. There was some pushback from some conservative students, but not as much as you’d expect, and we mostly were made to feel welcome.
Russ and I found that, after college, the world around us didn’t see being Catholic and being gay as complementary as our college community did. The years since college did a lot to distance me from a Catholic identity. When we lived in Massachusetts, I started attending an Episcopal church and was received into the tradition. I loved my Episcopal church, and the pastor who was there is still my favorite clergy person I’ve ever met. When we moved to Ohio, I attended an Episcopal church here and had a bad experience, and so I stayed away from churches for a while. I eventually landed at a United Church of Christ church in Cleveland, and that community was incredibly loving and welcoming to me. The pastor there is an openly gay man, and he is one of the kindest, most lovable souls I’ve ever met. Russ and I eventually moved a good distance away from that church, and I stopped attending, and upon reflection, I discovered that the United Church of Christ - while an incredible faith tradition - is not the right faith tradition for me.
At some point in the years between moving to Ohio and attending the UCC church, I felt nostalgic about my time in Jesuit places. I got a tattoo on my ribs of a cross with the letters “AMDG” on it. “AMDG” is short for “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam”, which is the Latin motto of the Jesuits, and means “For the greater glory of God”. It’s the only one of my 14 tattoos that I’ve ever considered getting covered up and/or removed. Having a constant reminder on my body of being Catholic - and all that comes with that - hasn’t always been a good thing.
I’m fast forwarding through a lot, but let’s move on to this past Christmas. The Friday before Christmas, Russ and I were asked to be pallbearers at the funeral of someone who was very loving to us. It was at a Catholic church, and when we left, we both remarked that we missed being in church together. We texted some friends of ours who are church-goers, and went with them to mass on Christmas Eve. (I briefly mentioned this in my looking back at 2023 post.) That specific mass had a huge impact on me. The priest talked a lot about social justice in a radical way, a way that would definitely upset the Catholics at the church I attended growing up. He talked about justice for trans women of color who are constantly being killed in our country. He talked about an end to war, and specifically called out the genocide against the Palestinian people, as well as condemning anti-semitism. He talked about racial justice, and how the institutional Church hasn’t done enough for racial minorities. It was a radical, revolutionary sermon that kept hearkening back to Jesus being born a human being, and what it means to be human and God at the same time. It was powerful, and left me with a longing to go back to church.
I used to often compare being Catholic to being American. A lot of (U.S.) Americans feel strongly opposed to a lot that our government does (or doesn’t do). We have a lot of strong feelings about what other citizens are doing right and wrong. We can be extreme. I think of being Catholic similarly - a lot of Catholics oppose what comes down from the institutional Church, and a lot of Catholics think other Catholics are “doing it wrong”. Oh and the “extreme” thing? Yeah, Catholics have that too. But even though a lot of Americans feel negatively about a lot of the country, they still want to be Americans. The same holds true for Catholics and the Catholic institution and community.
The title of this blog post is “Back in my Body”, which is the name of an awesome Maggie Rogers song. The first few times I thought about writing this blog post, a lot of it had to do with bodies. I’ve also mentioned bodies a few times throughout this one.
If I’m being honest, I still - a million years after starting high school - feel weird writing the word “body”. I feel even weirder about the phrase “my body”. I think that a lot of that comes from my (let’s face it, puritanical) Catholic upbringing. But a lot of it also comes from our society. We’re supposed to have the perfect body, but we’re not supposed to have any unsavory bodily functions. We’re supposed to desire people with very specific body types, but we can only talk about that desire in very specific circumstances, and if our desired body type deviates from the expectation, then we DEFINITELY shouldn’t talk about that. We want to see more of each other’s bodies, but we’d better not say that or admit to it. You can feel good about your body if it fits a bunch of impossible to achieve standards, but if it doesn’t, you should feel TERRIBLE about your body. And God forbid your body starts to age!!
The Catholic norms for bodies are even weirder. We can sing “We Are One Body” or talk about the Body and Blood of Christ, and we can talk about God becoming human in Jesus, but - at least according to what I was taught - the only way we can allow ourselves to experience pleasure in our bodies is if the pleasure is secondary to the act of procreation.
But if God saw fit to become human as Jesus, why do Catholics feel the way they do about bodies? And certainly Catholics aren’t the only ones - almost any world religion I can think of has very specific restrictions on what people can do with their bodies. I’m not going to spend the rest of this post writing Daniel’s Theology of the Body (although I have to admit, it’s tempting), but I am going to write a little bit more about my body (even if I cringe when I write that phrase) and my being Catholic, and the intersection of the two.
Like I mentioned, I felt separated from my body for a lot of years growing up. At the beginning of college I started to feel connected to my body and my queerness, but something happened my sophomore year of college that did a lot of damage to my connection with my body. After college, I internalized a lot of the gay male body standards, and I never fit the conventionally attractive version of “gay man”, and so I felt bad about myself, as a lot of gay men do. I think the distance from my Catholic upbringing, the years spent in a marriage with an incredible spouse, exposure to the gay bear community, and, surprisingly, Instagram did a lot to change my view of my body.
On Instagram, I made a conscious effort to follow body positive, body neutral, or fat positive accounts. I discovered the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance on Instagram after having read Sonya Renee Taylor’s book “The Body Is Not An Apology”. I truly think exposure to people of all body types - and to the work that people are actively doing to combat body oppression - makes a huge difference in how we view ourselves. One of my favorite Instagram accounts is All Bodies Welcome Yoga, which helped me start to heal my relationship with exercise, and to see it as something to do for my body and for my health instead of as something to change my body or achieve a “perfect” body.
And then, back to that Christmas mass. The priest talked about embodiment, about being embodied beings, about what it is to be divine and human. It planted a seed in my head that’s been slowly growing - that maybe I can be Catholic and can love my body without the sort of expectations, norms, restrictions, standards, and oppression that the Catholic Church, gay male norms, and our larger society have placed on me.
I missed thinking of myself as Catholic. I didn’t know how to reconcile my love for my body and my queerness and all bodies and all sexualities with the thought of being Catholic. But the last few weeks when I’ve seen myself in the mirror without a shirt on, that tattoo that I’ve thought about covering up has looked pretty good to me. And I keep thinking about how badly I want Russ and I to go back to that church we went to on Christmas Eve. I don’t know what this 38 year old version of me even means by “Catholic”, except that I have seen so many versions of being Catholic at this point that I think a sex-positive, fat-positive, feminist, Queer, social-justice oriented, and liberation-based version of Catholic can exist for me. I remember hearing a lot of criticisms of “Cafeteria Catholics” growing up, but I am absolutely a Cafeteria Catholic, and it’s good to be back - back in my body, and back in the Catholic body.