Reading Time: Approximate 25 minutes
Tina Beattie, Professor Emerita of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton in London, is a feminist Catholic theologian of global repute, and a founding supporter of LGB Christians and Friends. Novelist, broadcaster and blogger, Tina makes regular appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, addressing a range of social and ethical issues. Tina is interviewed here by Dr Mark Chater, a Core Team Member of LGB Christians.
Introducing Tina Beattie: From Typist to Theologian
Mark Chater: First of all I want to say thank you, Tina, for agreeing to be interviewed for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Christians and Friends. For supporters of LGB Christians who might not know much about you, could you start by telling us about yourself, how you came to discover the major themes of your academic work, and how those themes have brought you to friendship with LGB Christians?
Tina Beattie: I spent most of my early life in sub-Saharan Africa, and we came to the UK in 1988 with our 4 little children. I left school at 15 and went on to become a typist and secretary. When our youngest child started school, I went to Bristol University as a mature student, and eventually became Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton, which was about the furthest from my girlish ambitions as it’s possible to get. But here I am.
“Gender Ideologies”: The Vatican and Beyond
I was a fairly recent convert to Catholicism when I went to university, and I became interested in the history of devotion to Mary. Up until then, as a Presbyterian, I’d harboured deep suspicions. So I did my PhD on Marian theology and devotion, and I did it by engaging mainly with Luce Irigaray, and with continental philosophy and theoretical and psychoanalytic sources.
In my undergraduate studies, I’d been introduced to feminist theology. As a woman, a mother, a wife, I recognised the questions, and the feminist critique resonated, but I did not share the pragmatic liberal optimism of some feminist theologians of the 1980s and 90s. That’s why I went down the road of continental theory. I was doing all this at the time of what academics call the linguistic turn, when there was a shift from the rhetoric of pragmatic liberal politics to psychoanalysis, and Marxist and linguistic theory. Because of my African background and my conversion to Catholicism, this resonated deeply with me. I was interested in the roots of desire and violence, love and hate, why are we so divided, and why is the Church so afraid of the sexual female body? Those were the questions I thought we had to grapple with, and I did so in the context of sacramental theology and gender.
On all these things, the Vatican decided I was persona non grata. So that was the first gender ideology that I ran into.
Naively as a convert, I believed that doing Catholic theology, one celebrated the marriage of reason and revelation, and that theology and philosophy were in a mutually illuminating relationship. Well, it wasn’t long before the Vatican banned me, because I couldn’t see any rational argument against same-sex marriage or women’s ordination, and it was clear that issues like abortion invited a more nuanced ethical perspective than theological absolutism. So on all these things, the Vatican decided I was persona non grata. So that was the first gender ideology that I ran into.
But these issues are not about absolute positions. They’re about relationships of power: who is being allowed to speak, and who is being silenced and why. So as gender has become a more complex and controversial issue, power relations have changed, and my position on gender has become challenged, I won’t say changed. I’m still against the gender ideology of the Catholic Church, or at least the magisterium. But I am also against the gender ideology of a new movement that has sprung up, associated with the ever-expanding 2SLGBTQA+ movement.
I was a trans advocate in my teaching and writing, when I believed the initial narrative
The Nuance of Trans Issues and the LGBTQIA+ Movement
Mark: Please unpack your opposition to 2SLGBTQA+ as an idea or movement.
Tina: There clearly are genuine cases of gender dysphoria, which is a condition that still needs far more research in order to understand its sources, causes and cures. I was a trans advocate in my teaching and writing, when I believed the initial narrative, that these are rare, complex and distressing conditions, and sometimes the distress is eased by hormonal and surgical interventions. I know that for some people struggling with a lifetime of gender dysphoria, transitioning allows them to lead full lives. I personally know a number of trans women and men for whom that’s true. But trans activism goes far beyond this, and research has undermined many claims about transitioning as a cure-all for a wide range of mental health struggles, suicidality, and body issues. The LGBTQIA+ movement has gone beyond gender dysphoria as a complex problem that needs more research. It’s promoting an ideology based on fantasies and myths about the sexed human body, which more and more scientists and medical practitioners are exposing and resisting.
One of my concerns is that by tagging on these meaningless slogans, legitimate struggles in the name of feminism and gay and lesbian rights become diluted and undermined.
I cannot support a cause when I don’t know what I’m supporting, or why this is a persecuted or marginalised group that needs defending. Gay and lesbian relationships have been under social and sometimes legal censure for much of Christian history, and therefore I have no problems identifying which rights I’m defending and why. But, for example, when have asexual people been denied their rights? The Church has been trying to make women asexual for 2,000 years! So tell me what Catholics are defending when they add that “A” to their list of causes. One of my concerns is that by tagging on these meaningless slogans, legitimate struggles in the name of feminism and gay and lesbian rights become diluted and undermined.
Queer is a theoretical approach to the history of sexuality, which I find helpful.
Queer used to be synonymous with gay, but now it occupies a separate category in the alphabet soup, which is fine, but again, I can’t use that rhetoric if I don’t know what it means. Queer is a theoretical approach to the history of sexuality, which I find helpful. But when Queer becomes yet another identity demanding legal recognition and protection, it’s no longer Queer, because the word Queer in theory refers that which is able to stand obliquely to fixed identities and sexualities in order to subvert the status quo. So these are some of my concerns. That’s why my position now is more ambivalent and conflicted than it was before. Sorry – that’s a very long answer!
Mark: But a very wonderful and rich answer, Tina. Thank you. It’s so interesting, and there’s so much that you’ve said that I and others in LGB Christians heartily agree with, particularly the ridiculous incoherence, and worse than incoherence, of the Pandora’s box that is LGBTQIA+. A slight digression, if I may. Are there any other theologians, alive or dead, who you think might come to your side in recognizing the gender ideology of the Catholic Church, and the more recent gender ideology of LGBTQIA+, and the importance of embodiment – the importance and primacy of our sexed bodies, as you have put it. Are there any other theologians?
Tina: In the 1990s, I was attracted by the arguments of some feminist theologians who engaged with the linguistic turn, such as Serene Jones, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Rebecca Chopp, and also by medievalists doing gender such as Caroline Walker Bynum.
Why have so many feminists just given up on that struggle, and said, Oh, you know, so long as you call yourself a woman, come and join us? I don’t understand it.
It was about giving women for the first time a language for our sexuality, our bodies, the goodness of the female body, which is why, though I’m not uncritical, theorists like Irigaray, Kristeva and Cixous, and Lacanian theorists, were resources I could draw on. But the people who in the 1990s were saying, we need to reclaim the female body in language, we need to talk about female sexuality, are not saying, Hold on a minute, you know this language has now been colonised. Breastfeeding is chest feeding. Women are people with vaginas or wombs. Pregnant women are pregnant people. Some lesbians have penises.
We women had hardly even begun to claim this language of female sexual embodiment before it was appropriated by men. I was probably nearly 50 before I had words I wasn’t ashamed to use for my own body. I was in my forties when I first got naked in women’s communal changing rooms. Why have so many feminists just given up on that struggle, and said, Oh, you know, so long as you call yourself a woman, come and join us? I don’t understand it.
If I lived in the US now with Trump’s regime, I would be speaking out against the violation of trans rights.
In this country the Supreme Court has changed the dynamics with the recent ruling, which is far more nuanced and limited than its critics are saying. Basically, it defends the rights of women to single sex spaces and activities, without taking away any of the rights that trans people already have in this country. If I lived in the US now with Trump’s regime, I would be speaking out against the violation of trans rights. If you want to use the term transphobic in a meaningful way, most certainly Trump and MAGA are transphobic, or at least, they are exploiting transphobia for cynical political ends. I think the way they are treating trans people, for example by arbitrarily banning them from military service, is appalling and must be spoken out against.
It’s complicated, and it’s the refusal to deal with complexity that troubles me. That’s why I speak now about two ideologies, the Vatican and the LGBTQIA+ movement, whose methods turn out to be the same.
It’s complicated, and it’s the refusal to deal with complexity that troubles me. That’s why I speak now about two ideologies, the Vatican and the LGBTQIA+ movement, whose methods turn out to be the same. I’ve been banned by both. I can no longer contribute to the blogs of an American university, because I come from what some in the US refer to as Terf Island and I argued in one of my blogs that there are good reasons why some British women, mainly on the left and many of whom are lesbians, are gender critical feminists. I was invited and then disinvited to give a talk in Canada, because I would upset their 2SLGBTQIA+ community. So there we go. I’m stuck in the middle with a few, stuck in the middle with you!
With the Vatican your sex should dictate your gender and, unfortunately in my view, with some LGBTQIA+ activists, your gender should dictate your sex
Theological Perspectives on Embodiment, Gender, and Freedom
Mark: Well, don’t worry. There’s plenty more of us. Looked at theologically, what do you think gender ideology is and why does it have such a strong grip? And I’m thinking particularly of the second of the two gender ideologies that you have analysed. What is it? It’s a phenomenon of some sort, and we need ways of understanding it theologically.
Tina: I would distinguish between an ideology and a use of language that is creative and poetic. So I think the mistake has been made in refusing to recognise the difference between sex and gender, and that’s where the two ideologies meet up. With the Vatican your sex should dictate your gender and, unfortunately in my view, with some LGBTQIA+ activists, your gender should dictate your sex. Both of these are ideologically dangerous. Whereas the Vatican says you must alter your psychology, your character, your sexual orientation, everything, in order to conform to deeply problematic binary heterosexual stereotypes, on the other side is an ideology that says, if you feel feminine, if you feel masculine, you must adapt your body to conform to gendered binary stereotypes – at least as far as some aspects of the trans movement are concerned. Trans women like Dylan Mulvaney and Jordan Gray perform the female body in ways that are exaggerated expressions of the most infantilising and degrading feminine stereotypes. The LGBTQ magazine Attitude made Mulvaney its woman of the year in 2023, and ‘her’ acceptance speech on YouTube is cringeworthy. I don’t know why so many feminists think this is okay. Gender critical feminists, many of whom are lesbians, recognise the problems, but a lot of women just seem willing to go along with it. Feminists have struggled for years to break free of these stereotypes, only to have them reinforced by some men who seem to think being a woman is nothing more than a parody of femininity.
But you asked me about theology. Theologically speaking, if you research the history of the Catholic Church, gender is an important way of speaking about relationships. It’s not always pleasing to feminists because it is hierarchical, but we can go beyond the hierarchies to recognise that there’s a fluidity of the language about how we position ourselves in society according to gender, and in many ways this can open into creative playfulness. I think gender should be playful, creative and performative, to borrow Judith Butler’s expression. We don’t need gender stereotypes. There are butch women and there are effeminate men (to use that kind of stereotypical language). Today, young people who manifest these kind of characteristics and ways of behaving are likely to be persuaded that they are trans.
Theologically, we need to see that the body is a gift/a given, but gender is a social construct that can be used in creative and oppressive ways. In many ways the body is a dark gift – vulnerable, mortal, prone to suffering and making demands on us that can feel restricting of the spirit. That insight is as old as St Paul!
These are forms of exclusion on the basis of bodiliness. We don’t say to such people, you’re born in the wrong body. We say society needs to change.
There are so many people whose bodies are a source of suffering or of social marginalisation or exclusion. That includes people with disabilities and people who are suffering from life-altering diseases and injuries, but it also includes people who are victims of racism, for example. These are forms of exclusion on the basis of bodiliness. We don’t say to such people, you’re born in the wrong body. We say society needs to change. Theologically, bodies are what we are, they’re the material selves we’re given to live as, and they’re never perfect by some idealised concept of perfection.
Also theologically, sex can be beautiful and loving, and it can be violent and abusive. For many of us who don’t experience war or other forms of collective violence, the most likely forms of violence we’ll experience, certainly for women and for many children, will take the form of sexual violence. I’ve experienced it. I know very few women who haven’t.
While I agree with those who say that the doctrine of original sin has been obsessively distorted by a focus on sex at the expense of other wrongs and injustices, that doesn’t mean that sex isn’t implicated as a potential source of abuse and violence. I think we’re seeing the dangers of a Utopian celebration of unleashed sexuality. Child pornographic abuse of the most extreme kind is exploding, thanks partly to the Internet, as is the misogynistic abuse of female bodies. Laura Bates has just published a book with the title, The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny. AI now has ways in which you can take any woman’s face and put it on an absolutely realistic body of extreme pornography. You can create yourself a pornographic girlfriend in the virtual world with AI.
When I started out on gender studies I was engaging with liberal theologies, both feminist and gay and lesbian. That was when the sex abuse scandal was breaking in the Catholic Church, and there was this weird dichotomy: on the liberal side we had returned to some Edenic state of joyful, innocent sex so long as you lifted the heavy hand of the bad old Christian tradition and let people express themselves sexually, while on the other side, we had a catastrophic abuse scandal in the Church. In the US, we still see that self-congratulatory Christian liberalism which gives carte blanche to the LGBTQIA+ inclusive movement. Of course I’m not suggesting that anybody in that incoherent conglomeration of sexual and gendered identities is more or less likely to be sexually violent or abusive, but we should not assume that every individual who shelters under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella is benign and should have unfettered access to women and children. Women are right to be wary of men and to caution our children against strange men, and good men understand that. And yes, a determined abuser doesn’t need a gender recognition certificate, but as soon as you allow anatomical males full access to female-only spaces on the basis of gender identity, you might as well do away with all such spaces. Locking my front door won’t deter a determined burglar, but I still lock my door!
Commercial Interests and the Commodification of Identity
You asked how this has such a strong grip on society. In Pride month nearly every High Street chain store has Progress Pride flags on display. Corporations do not line up behind vulnerable minority causes. There is a huge capitalist investment in this, fuelled partly by big pharma. In order to maintain the illusion of sex change (I’m using those words intentionally), you need to be on a lifetime’s regime of hormones. Big Pharma are invested in this. There’s a chilling market research report that shows how promoting trans surgery to young people in the global South is being seen as a potential source of profits for these companies. Jennifer Bilek has a blog called The Eleventh Hour: Transgender, Technology, Capitalism, and she’s recently written a book. She argues persuasively that this is a movement fuelled by corporate billionaires with transhumanist ideologies and investment in Big Pharma.
Mark: And there are all sorts of other big corporates who have been putting money into organizations like Stonewall, and who are proud to be associated with the progress flag. In addition to promoting Pharma, is it also about burnishing their own reputation as progressive forces in society, and opening up new markets? Do we really believe they’re interested in our rights? When Gay and Lesbian people were struggling for their rights in the sixties and seventies, where were the corporate donors?
Tina: And in the US now, the corporations are pulling out very quickly now that Trump has made it no longer fashionable to support this cause. They’re not there in the long run. They’re not there to support human rights. They are the ultimate violators of human rights.
A Call for Discernment and Protection of the Vulnerable
Mark: Is a distorted notion of freedom something at the heart of your concerns? I see in the LGBTQIA+ ideology, in manifestations of gender ideology, a definition of freedom that is all about ‘me’, and it’s about my rights to intrude into other people’s spaces, my rights to be whoever I want to be, and so on. And that is not the freedom of which the Judeo-Christian tradition at its best speaks, and it is not the freedom that’s going to lead us to health and wholeness and salvation. Do you want to say something about notions of freedom?
Tina: Well, I am a liberal insofar as I do agree that an adult’s freedom should only be curtailed by the harm it does to others and the ways it impinges upon the freedom of others. But immediately we’re into a very complex social question, because in a way, everything we do has a social dimension. I’m very aware, as a heterosexual married woman, that society still puts a cordon of security and protection around me that is not afforded to my gay and lesbian friends, even if it’s afforded in law. It’s much easier for me to walk down the road holding hands with my husband than it would be for you to walk down the road holding hands with your partner or lover.
I do want the maximum freedom, and I agree with the Catholic teaching that we have a debt to conscience before anything else. So, even if my conscience is misinformed, even if it leads me to do wrong, I have a right to follow my conscience. I want to protect that belief, and also the Catholic doctrine that says you must not use the law to enforce morality. You must only use the law to protect society, so all that I agree with. But freedom? What we’re seeing is often not an expression of true freedom but an explosion of narcissistic individualism driven by capitalism.
I want to use the word social contagion for teenage girls, as I would about anorexia or cutting, or any of the other things they are susceptible to.
What adults do, so long as they’re not harming anyone else, is up to them. I have no desire to intrude upon the identities, the body modifications, the mutually consented sex lives of adults (though what constitutes consent is also a complex question). I don’t have to understand it, and I don’t have to justify it, to accept that it’s part of what it means to be free in a liberal democracy. And that’s what I want.
With regard to young people, adolescence is a time of experimentation. Let teenagers change their pronouns and play with their identities. That’s what growing up is about. But puberty blockers interrupt a vital process of development, and there are growing concerns about their impact on bone development, brain development, fertility and sexuality, etc. Adolescence is a troubled time, a traumatic time. We’re transitioning from childhood to adulthood. But puberty blockers we now know have long term, unknown effects, and current research such as the Cass Review suggests that they often lead to more radical surgical and hormonal interventions.
I want to use the word social contagion for teenage girls, as I would about anorexia or cutting, or any of the other things they are susceptible to. Some of the teenage girls I meet are not trans but they don’t feel feminine, so they say they’re non-binary. I think the biggest growth in non-binary identity is among young women. And I get it, you know, because it’s an age when the stereotypes of femininity get promoted. The female body at puberty is commodified, objectified, sexualized in ways that I think very few women who have been through puberty would fail to recognize as deeply troubling. Suddenly, men are looking at you, groping you, and your childhood body is morphing in disturbing ways with hormonal flux into the mix. So I think adults need to be more responsible. I want to give teenagers and young people space to experiment and make mistakes while protecting them from puberty blockers and irreversible interventions.
Mark: And we’ve all been there.
Tina: We’ve all been there. We’ve all made mistakes.
Mark: Could we explore the Christian theological ideas and the spiritual practices which we could call on to engage critically with misogyny and the trans contagion? What are those ideas and practices and how could they help us? Let me just throw out a couple and see if you want to seize on them or pick something else.
The idea that God became incarnate in Christ, in a human body, the embodiment of God in the Church and in the world, and in our own bodies; the way in which we encounter the body of Christ in Eucharist and other sacraments: is it useful to bring this out of the cupboard and dust it off? And another one might be Catholic social teaching in which the rights of one group need to be balanced with the rights of another: this is where Leo XIV, in his choice of papal name, might be a very significant voice. Would you like to comment on those or mention some others? ( The previous Pope of that name, Leo XIII, in 1891 authored the encyclical Rerum Novarum, a key founding document in the Catholic church’s teaching on social and economic injustice, balancing rights, and the common good.)
Tina: One problem is, the female body is sacramentally negative in the Catholic Church. Apart from marriage, which requires both sexes to be present, there is no sacrament for which the female body must be present. And before we can talk about the inclusivity of other bodies, why don’t we see this as the plank in the eye of the Church? How can you advocate for the inclusion of trans women when you don’t allow for the inclusion of the sexually gifted female body made in the image of God?
it’s people with the loudest voices who can proclaim their suffering most loudly, who are privileged while the suffering of others is dismissed.
So these things always raise questions. But if we’re talking about how Christians address these issues, then we have to ask how we make the body the gift that it is, and as I’ve already said, it’s a dark gift. The body is finite, it does suffer. I am my body. When my body is suffering, I’m suffering, but the idea that you can be born in the wrong body is an aesthetic of pagan perfectionism. Christianity is called to care for the vulnerable body, the suffering body, the abjected body.
Nina Power wrote a very good book that I recommend. It’s called, What Do Men Want? Her argument is that suffering is part of the human condition, it’s not a competition, but it’s people with the loudest voices who can proclaim their suffering most loudly, who are privileged while the suffering of others is dismissed. It’s a book well worth reading. I recommend it.
the Church must be attentive to those with gender dysphoria while resisting its ideological appropriation
Mark: Thank you. Yes, there is certainly an observable phenomenon of competitive victimhood going around at the moment. In all of this, and the people who shout the loudest get the most attention in terms of legislation.
Tina: The most suffering victims don’t have a megaphone. So the Church must be attentive to those with gender dysphoria while resisting its ideological appropriation. This calls for discernment, and for more understanding and research than we currently have available, because so many ideological interests are behind much research funding and reporting.
The theological resources we have are that we are male and female, made in the image of God, and that Christ was fully human in a fully human body that happened to be male. But we also have a liturgical and sacramental tradition that performs gender in ways that liberate us from our day to day roles and release us into erotic and nuptial exchanges of eschatological hope, and that’s where I part company with some liberal theologians who would eradicate all that language. I see gender as the human expressiveness that we derive from the binary sex of our mammalian bodies. We are an animal species that would die out if it weren’t for sexual difference, but that’s not all we are by any means.
We are all burdened by conformity to gender stereotypes.
So while affirming sexual binaries, I also want to say in gendered terms, we’re all non-binary. That’s why I find this preoccupation with non-binary identities and plural pronouns quite misanthropic, because it’s a form of asserting a way of being superior to or different from the hoi polloi, those of us who are put into a binary box as if we all conform mindlessly to the roles assigned to us. We’re all non-binary, if we’re being true to ourselves. We are all burdened by conformity to gender stereotypes.
Mark: Maybe what you’re talking about is preoccupation with self. And is the abandonment of self another strand of healthy Christian theology? I don’t mean the abandonment of self in ways that women particularly are all too accustomed to, which is the negation of their needs. I don’t mean that. I mean the abandonment of self in a more generalized sense. Stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about relationship and society.
Tina: Yes, I agree. I think the question of the self is a complex and deep one. For Christians, self-discovery is paradoxically a loss of self through a journey into the mystery of the Godhead. That takes a lifetime. Catherine of Siena says you can’t know God unless you know yourself, and I think this is a constant wrestling between losing the self in a good sense and denying the self in a bad sense. Thomas Aquinas says I must love myself as I love my neighbour, because I am my closest neighbour. I love that. It suggests the kind of divided sense of self that the theorists I’ve mentioned such as Kristeva also refer to. But for Thomas neighbourly love isn’t sentimental. It means wanting the best for myself as I do for my neighbour, and that might involve some honesty and correction!
But yes, you refer to the social dimension. We are relational. We can’t just say it’s my right to change who I am, and society has no say in that and must affirm me. I was born into radical dependency, and I will die in radical dependency (unless the current parliamentary debate decides that they’ll kill me off to spare me that indignity which is another issue about body hatred). We live in a society that really hates the body, whether it’s killing off sick people or transing non-ideal bodies. So yes, we are relational. We are always in relationship. What I do to myself almost always creates ripples in the social pool. Because I speak out on these issues, I get private messages from distressed parents and loved ones about young transitioners. I have conversations with young women in universities who are afraid to speak out because they’ll be labelled transphobic by their peers. If you’re a professor parading your LGBTQIA+ credentials and calling everyone who doesn’t agree with you a terf, you are not going to hear the truth from your students who may not agree with you. I follow the stories of trans widows, women whose husbands have transitioned, and often there are stories of quite misogynistic abuse preceding transitions. There are fantasies of domination that are associated with the female body, and wives who speak out sometimes have disturbing stories to tell.
As I say, I respect the freedom of adults to live as they choose, but I respect the freedom of those who are hurt by their actions to speak.
Mark: For the record, Tina, at the time of writing, June 2025, you’ve been on social media about the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery’s public exhibit, Gender Stories, with public images of cutting. Do you want to just give a crisp summary of that, and your objections to it.
Tina: Well, I have no objections to any private art gallery staging art, and I agree art should be sometimes subversive and call things into question. But this is Bristol’s main publicly funded art gallery, and it has an exhibition called Gender Stories, running from May through October, so all through the school holidays, when most children visit. I haven’t been there yet. I’m going next month, but for those who know that museum, it has a magnificent entrance hall. From all the pictures I’ve seen, there are two vast murals of torsos with double mastectomy scars. They’re repeated all around the walls in the upper galleries. The art is done by a trans man called Mr. Samo. It’s subversive radical art, it has its place, but I don’t think this kind of ideology has a place in a public museum where you cannot make an adult decision about whether or not to take your children into the exhibition, because it’s in the main entrance hall. There’s no room for discretion. I’m getting people saying, Oh, children wouldn’t notice. But of course, children notice. I mean, I’ve spent years taking children into that museum. It’s one of my favourite places, and in school holidays on wet days it’s a refuge for families. The whole point of taking them to a museum is to say, look at this and explain it so you shouldn’t have to walk past in the hopes they won’t notice.
Mark: A final question, which is a bit of an outrider in a way. Do you want to comment on Pope Leo XIV? In relation to the issues we’ve been discussing, how is he going to pan out, do you think?
Tina: It’s too early to tell, I mean, is the Pope a Catholic?. We can make certain assumptions about some of the positions he holds, or he wouldn’t be Pope. But God works in mysterious ways. There is no track record yet, but I think of a character like Oscar Romero.
People in high positions in the church can radically change. At the moment Pope Leo is on record as having said he doesn’t agree with women priests or women deacons, but it also seems that he may have left an opening for women deacons. So let’s see, let’s give him time. I think it was an incredibly astute appointment. Probably the Holy Spirit had a little human help! Let’s give them time. I think it’s a wise choice, given global politics at the moment, given the situation of the United States and the Church in the United States. It was really surprising, but on reflection probably the best choice that could be made.
Mark: You’ve told us your thoughts. How does he make you feel?
Tina: Well, we emphasise feelings too much these days. That’s part of the problem. It’s what I think, not what I feel that matters. That’s what we’re talking about. But I feel, well, I feel I’ve lost patience, really, as a woman with the church, so I practise as much as I’m able to. I find I’m just wearied with the androcentrism of it all.
I think the social teaching is wonderful. It’s the best political system we have, and the Pope is the best person to promote it; but if you still regard half the human race as unable to stand in persona Christi because they’ve got female bodies, where does social justice even begin to go? I think there’s a whole elephant in the room that makes me more and more cautious about celebrating too much.
I do believe the Catholic Church is what it says. I wouldn’t be in here otherwise, so in the long term I believe this is the hope for humankind, and I’m thankful for Pope Leo. But feelings wise. Oh, I don’t know.
Mark: Let me say formally, on behalf of LGB Christians and friends, thank you for being our friend, for sharing your thoughts, and also for all your public witness to sanity and compassion, which we know attracts some flack. But let’s be positive, it also attracts a great deal of admiration and respect. So many, many thanks for all of that, and for sharing your thoughts in this conversation.