Panel: THE SACRAMENTALITY OF SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT: THE ROLE OF THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION FOR PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE TRANSFORMATION



154.10 - TOWARDS A SACRAMENTAL THEOLOGY OF EROTOHISTORIORAPHY

AUTHORS:
Rodewald N. (Loyola University Chicago ~ Chicago ~ United States of America)
Text:
LGBTQ+ youth face increased rates of homelessness, suicidality, and mental illness. Among Catholic LGBTQ+ youth, magisterial teaching—and the lack of adequate pastoral care that follows from this teaching—is cited as a contributing factor in suicidality and familial exclusion. This paper analyzes the link between magisterial teaching and adverse outcomes for LGBTQ+ individuals as one of epistemic injustice resulting from hermeneutical marginalization. This paper further proposes a constructive sacramental theology of erotohistoriograhy to address this injustice. Placing research by Ish Ruiz in conversation with Charles Mills and Miranda Fricker, this paper contends that adverse outcomes for queer Catholic youth arise from hermeneutical marginalization. Magisterial teaching creates a linguistic lacuna in which queer Catholics cannot find institutionally acceptable theological language to describe their encounters with God's grace, thus contributing to self-harm, alongside familial and ecclesial marginalization. A sacramental theology of erotohistoriography, that is, a theology that understands sacraments as physical, erotic encounters that queer temporality, opens the Catholic imagination to new possibilities for recognizing the presence of grace in queer lives. Building from Edward Schillebeeckx's theology of the sacramental encounter with Christ, sacraments can be understood as physical and bodily encounters. Viewed through Margaret Kamitsuka's theology of eros, the sacraments are also erotic: in them human beings erotically encounter the human Christ in an efficacious, transcendental yearning for God. Finally, in dialogue with Elizabeth Freeman, this paper suggests that sacraments queer heteronormative temporality. As queer, temporal disruptors, sacraments take on a political significance as a means of guarding memories of suffering and joys from the destruction of linear time, thus opening the Catholic imagination to the possibility of recognizing queer grace.