Category: Catholic Re-Visions

Contemplating a radical response to contemporary politics of (sexual) desire

Polish Catholics protest against the Church’s conservative approach to sexuality. Liberal traditions have been successfully silenced since John Paul II, so now they create their own theologies of desire. Will the Church listen?

Reflections on a Catholic ‘gender paradox’: When womens’ desire for priests drives the Church’s ‘passionate machine’

In Spain, a man contests the sexual politics of the Catholic Church by opening the first LGBTQ+ faith refuge.

As part of a larger project of racial profiling, officer testimonies reveal that the establishment of reasonable suspicion, the search and seizure of vehicles, and the violation of fourth amendment rights of Mexican and Mexican-American drivers often rely on faith-based determinations between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Officers in such cases incorporate information learned at privately-run law enforcement trainings and seminars, where religion, racial profiling, and crimmigration intersect.

This essay invites readers to consider what white Catholics reveal about the history and meaning of the term “law and order,” and what that turn of phrase reveals about twentieth century Catholicism in the United States.

This post considers how the purportedly “secular” state strategically deployed “Catholicism” in its imperial actions abroad and how those reverberated at home. The Central Intelligence Agency found Catholicism to be a useful ideological ally in the struggle against communism during the Cold War, raising up anticommunist, conservative, and largely white US Catholics as ideal citizens at home to support their use of Vietnamese Catholics as anticommunist allies abroad.

Using the example of nineteenth-century “Americanist” archbishop John Ireland, and his boarding school initiatives in Minnesota, this essay demonstrates how the US Catholic Church came to behave as an American institution by seeking common ground with liberal ideals of freedom, while simultaneously embracing state policing and punishment against populations marginalized from the body politic.

This essay reflects on intra-Catholic antagonisms and state-sponsored surveillance throughout the McCarthy era as a tool for considering the hazards of allowing the state to define categories and respectable means of political dissent.

The London Catholic Worker creates the physical and intellectual spaces in which to practice radical hospitality and explore Christian anarchism. As these spaces can be transitory, easily destroyed or abandoned, the Catholic Worker must draw on its personalist and anarchist roots to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

As the Catholic Worker movement confronts anti-Black racism more earnestly, questions arise about whether taking an active anti-racism stance can be reconciled with Catholic Worker anarchism, specifically when dealing with the state.

Catholic Worker practices of living among and listening closely to the voices of the most marginalized in our society, as well as its radical political analysis and dedication to ongoing clarification of thought in the form of anti-racism training, have motivated Catholic Workers to act against police violence towards People of Color.