Serious Branding Issues
04/29/2024
I love the Church. It’s strange that public and private agita about the Catholic “brand” makes me say “I love the Church” so plainly. Much like the way I am bored by a plain pizza, I don’t like to say things plainly. I delight in theopoetic flourish and obtuse grandiloquence, but there is a benefit to laying down one’s cards to profess love, to share hard news, to speak truth.
Now is a season for remembering why I love the Church. I’ve attended long vigils with ever ancient, ever new hymns and delighted in the joy of baptismal welcomes to my newest (some very small) siblings in Christ. The spring semester marks transitions for students and colleagues as we professors end the academic year. The pilgrim people of God are always in some way on the move, and I love that the Church is a dynamic, international, intergenerational community of very different people sharing faith and reason, sharing joy and hope, sharing griefs and anxieties.
I have also spent much time recently defending the sentence “I love the Church” to those wounded, confused and disappointed by its document on dignity. I have been caught in the whirlwind of courageous civil discourse and intentional reflection about Dignitas Infinita. With its stated goal of “offering important clarifications that can help avoid frequent confusion that surrounds the use of the term ‘dignity’” the Declaration on Human Dignity “does not set out to exhaust such a rich and crucial subject.” Its genre is a teaching document. Authorized (but not authored) by Pope Francis, the Declaration comes from one of the highest teaching organizations of the Roman Catholic Church: the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (now DDF, formerly the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, itself just one of the many rebrands for the historical Sacred Roman and Universal Inquisition).
Any statements of the DDF need to be taken seriously by the faithful. They become an immediate point of reference for non-Catholics as to what the Church officially teaches. Another sign of springtime, this declaration sprouted the perennials of commentary from mainstream media pundits as well as Catholic thinkers across the political, theological and gender spectrum. One of the most formative and helpful takes for my thinking came from Colleen Dulle on this very blog. There’s some fun in the way Vatican intrigue makes its way into my non-theological podcast and news diet.
I won’t rehash the headlines about Dignitas Infinita because I want to invite people to take the document seriously, to read it and think with it, against it, through it, despite it, informed by it. That is what it means for the Church to have official doctrine, that is, official teaching. Frankly, the “rapidification” of our news cycle means that many Catholic and non-Catholic reactions to the DDF will need to be adjusted and patched over time, perhaps like the script for an AI-generated and recently laicized “priest” bot. Taking the Church seriously in love means offering the gift of our time. I wish more of my energy could be spent absorbing the beautiful harmony between the distinctions about infinite dignity in the declaration’s introduction: ontological dignity (an irrevocable consequence of the human being as a beloved creature of God), moral dignity (referring to the use and abuse of human freedom), social dignity (a sense of the quality of life in terms of material conditions) and existential dignity (a sense of the quality of life as perceived and experienced).
But I admit, it is hard for me to take other parts of the declaration seriously because of the lack of any citations to its lived and liturgical tradition. None of the following words appear in the declaration: “liturgy,” “sacrament,” “baptism,” “rite” or “eucharist.” The word “prayer” only appears in the titles of footnotes. So much for lex orandi, lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of belief—when it comes to this set of doctrinal clarifications.
I love the Church, so I want to take the DDF seriously, especially as I live out my sacramental vocation as a father to a baptized daughter. The amply commented upon critique of “gender theory” or “gender ideology” fails to include any reflection on the sacraments or scripture. The Church has a gender theory, that is, a theory as to how biological sexual differences should manifest in human social relations. Part of that theory derives from the rite of baptism, where little boys and little girls are both wrapped in a similar looking white garment. The point of the Church’s sacramental gender theory, expressed in a ritual tradition, affirms the theology of St. Paul: “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus,” (Gal 3:27-28). In the rite of baptism, ordinary social demarcations of identity are relativized to the identity of the people of God as the mystical body of Christ. The physical and social realities of racial, sexual, religious and class differences do not vanish because of this ontological change. The visible sign of baptism proclaims that God’s love can wash away even the sin that stops such beautiful and holy differences from radiating the truth of God’s triune love. The sacrament testifies to ontological dignity. I wish the DDF would testify to the social dignity conferred by our always developing and dynamic understandings of gender roles. And that’s just one section.
Charles A. Gillespie is an assistant professor in the department of Catholic Studies and director of the Pioneer Journey at Sacred Heart University.