This study examines the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality and between historical homophobia and contemporary struggles between the Church and the homosexual? Moving from the Gothic to the late Twentieth-century, from Europe to America, it interrogates what is queer about Catholicism and what is modern about homosexuality.

How does one reconcile the tension between the community of one’s own Catholic upbringing and a sexuality and gender identity that may be in conflict with some of the tenets of the faith – especially when one is a member of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex community? Queer and Catholic offers a source of comfort to members of these communities, focusing on not only practicing Catholics, but also the entire experience of growing up Catholic. This unique book discusses Catholicism beyond its religiosity and considers its implications as a culture of origin. This widely varied and entertaining book pulls together a comprehensive collection of essays, stories, and poetry that together represent an honest and engaging reflection of being a queer person within the Catholic experience.

The book that can help you reconcile being both gay and Catholic Sons of the Church: The Witnessing of Gay Catholic Men spotlights testimonials from over thirty gay Catholic men to answer the question, “How can you be gay and Catholic?” Dr. Thomas B. Stevenson, who received degrees from the University of Notre Dame, Boston College, and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, explores this question, using various interviews to thoroughly analyze the many dimensions of being gay and Catholic while providing a powerful and convincing criticism of Church teaching on homosexuality. This thoughtful, surprisingly reverent book is the answer for those gay readers who long for a religious connection, as well as for Catholic readers and those in pastoral positions who want and need to hear the stories of gay people firsthand. Sons of the Church: The Witnessing of Gay Catholic Men tells one story—the story of what it is like to be gay and Catholic—through the various stories of over thirty gay Catholic men. Each chapter is arranged thematically, beginning with experiences of being homosexual and Catholic during childhood and youth. Subsequent chapters delve into the ways these men each finally accepted themselves and integrated their sexuality, related to others who did or did not understand, dealt with homosexual promiscuity, found intimate relationships, became a part of a community, and ultimately came to terms with the Catholic Church and their faith. Throughout, these ’witnesses’ explain how their faith in God guides them through the various experiences and issues they face. The positive aspects of Catholic Christianity are respectfully explored at the same time as the present Church teaching on homosexuality is challenged. Sons of the Church uses interviews to explore: Catholics coming to terms with their homosexuality the experiences of young men recognizing their sexuality suffering and oppression by society and the Church acceptance of self integration of goodness and lovability of homosexuality moral issues of promiscuity among gay men gay relationships and the Catholic dimensions of commitment criticisms of gay culture the Catholic Church teachings on homosexuality the answer to the question, “How can you be gay and Catholic?” Sons of the Church: The Witnessing of Gay Catholic Men is enlightening reading essential for educators, students, counselors, priests, nuns, psychologists, and theologians. Catholic people, gay people, and every educated reader will find that the interviews and ideas here stimulate thought and create a greater understanding of the issue of homosexuality and faith.

This volume, like its companion, Voices of Our Times, collects essays drawn from a series of public conferences held in autumn 2011 entitled “More than a Monologue.” The series was the fruit of collaboration among four institutions of higher learning: two Catholic universities and two nondenominational divinity schools. The conferences aimed to raise awareness of and advance informed, compassionate, and dialogical conversation about issues of sexual diversity within the Catholic community, as well as in the broader civic worlds that the Catholic Church and Catholic people inhabit. They generated fresh, rich sets of scholarly and reflective contributions that promise to take forward the delicate work of theological-ethical and ecclesial development. Along with Voices of Our Times, this volume captures insights from the conferences and aims to foster what the Jesuit Superior General, Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, has called the “depth of thought and imagination” needed to engage effectively with complex realities, especially in areas marked by brokenness, pain, and the need for healing. The volumes will serve as vital resources for understanding and addressing better the too often fraught relations between LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) persons, their loved ones and allies, and the Catholic community. Inquiry, Thought, and Expression explores dimensions of ministry, ethics, theology, and law related to a range of LGBTQ concerns, including Catholic teaching, its reception among the faithful, and the Roman Catholic Church’s significant role in world societies. Within the volume, a series of essays on ministry explores various perspectives not frequently heard within the church. Marriage equality and the treatment of LGBTQ individuals by and within the Roman Catholic Church are considered from the vantage points of law, ethics, and theology. Themes of language and discourse are explored in analyses of the place of sexual diversity in church history, thought, and authority. The two volumes of More than a Monologue, like the conferences from which they developed, actively move beyond the monologic voice of the institutional church on the subject of LGBTQ issues, inviting and promoting open conversations about sexual diversity and the church. Those who read Inquiry, Thought, and Expression will encounter not just an excellent resource for research and teaching in the area of moral theology but also an opportunity to actively listen to and engage in groundbreaking discussions about faith and sexuality within and outside the Catholic Church.

This book offers a new perspective on the often-overlooked lives of lay women in the English Roman Catholic Church. It explores how over a century ago in England some exceptional Catholic lay women – Margaret Fletcher, Maude Petre, Radclyffe Hall, and Mabel Batten - negotiated non-traditional family lives and were actively practicing their faith, while not adhering to perceived structures of femininity, power, and sexuality. Focusing on c. 1880-1930, a time of dynamism and change in both England and the Church, these remarkable women represent a rethinking of what it meant to be a lay women in the English Roman Catholic Church. Their pious transgressions demonstrate the multiplicity of ways lay women powerfully asserted aspects of their faith while contravening boundaries traditionally assumed for them in an ostensibly patriarchal religion. In fact, the Church could be a place for expressions of unconventional religiosity and reinterpretations of womanhood and domesticity. Connecting together the lives of these women for the first time, this work fills a lacuna in the scholarship of modern Catholic and gender history. Drawing from private collections and numerous archives, it illustrates the surprising range of modes of Lived Catholicism and devotion to faith. Students and scholars of Catholicism, gender, and LGBTQIA+ studies will find significant merit in a book that assigns lay women a more prominent role in the English Catholic Church and offers examples of the flexibility of Roman Catholicism.

Tracing the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de siècle - Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson - to the modernist writers of the following generation, this book charts the legacy of decadent Catholicism in the fiction and poetry of British and Irish modernists. Linking the later writers with their literary predecessors, Martin Lockerd examines the shifts in representation of Catholic decadence in the works of W. B. Yeats through Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot; the adoption and transformation of anti-Catholicism in Irish writers George Moore and James Joyce; the Catholic literary revival as portrayed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; and the attraction to decadent Catholicism still felt by postmodernist writers D.B.C. Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst. Drawing on new archival research, this study revisits some of the central works of modernist literature and undermines existing myths of modernist newness and secularism to supplant them with a record of spiritual turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and a project of cultural subversion that paradoxically relied upon the institutional bulwark of European Christianity. Lockerd explores the aesthetic, sexual, and political implications of the relationship between decadent art and Catholicism as it found a new voice in the works of iconoclastic modernist writers.