In The Sacrament of Same-Sex Marriage, Bridget Burke Ravizza lightly interprets heartwarming, heartrending interviews of twenty-two married gay and lesbian couples with “a meaningful connection to the Catholic tradition” (xv) on their experiences of grace, mutual love, generosity toward the community, vocation to both marriage and their ministries and professions, and (of course) struggles with their families and the Catholic church. On the basis of these conversations, which follow a similar volume that she and Julie Massey wrote on heterosexual Catholic married couples (50), she argues:

that the [Catholic] church should expand its definition of marriage to include same-sex couples . . . [for] the testimony of the couples in my study shows that—far from thwarting potential and cutting people off from God—these relationships lead to virtue, growth in wholeness and authenticity, fullness of life and generativity, and a deepening sense of God’s goodness and love (184).

For Burke Ravizza, the proof is in the pudding: the abundant fruits of the Spirit in her interviewees’ lives. The partners are sacraments to each other and the world (1, chapter 2). She argues that the wisdom of their experiences—challenging the Vatican’s interpretations of scripture and Catholic tradition and expressed as the sensus fidei, or internal knowledge of God’s truth—should give rise to a transformation in the sensus fidelium, or the whole church’s wisdom (185). The recent Catholic Synod on Synodality (2021–24) only strengthens her argument that the rest of the Church must listen to and recognize their charisms.

Burke Ravizza’s book is rich in so many ways: her masterful use of ethnography to capture ethics and theology at ground level; the beauty and profundity that her questions inspired in her subjects’ responses; their pained accounting of the terrible costs many paid when outed and dismissed from their ministries in Catholic institutions; her critical yet appreciative weaving of church teaching and contemporary theology across the warp of their stories; and many others. In what follows I’ll pick up only one thread: I’ll amplify Burke Ravizza’s claim that these couples have a genuinely Catholic understanding of sacramental marriage. In other words, they thoroughly understand, appreciate, and embrace not just progressive Catholic sacramental theology but also Vatican sacramental theology, and they are simply speaking it back to the church. It is the Vatican’s view of sex and gender, not theirs, and possibly even the Vatican’s view of children, not theirs, that is at odds with this shared theology of marriage. Something has to give.

Curbing Temptation and Organizing Reproduction

The incoherence of contemporary Catholic theology of marriage is rooted in Christianity’s origins. Matrimony begins as a means to calm passion and organize heterosexual reproduction, and it ends as a publicly celebrated, grace-filled, ecclesiastically approved sacrament, rooted in love, that partners “mutually confer upon each other” in the presence of a priest rather than through him—and for which heterosexuality is not an obvious logical condition.1

Christian marriage gets off to an inauspicious start in the New Testament, as St. Paul recommends celibacy, grudgingly conceding marriage only to those who are “aflame with passion” (1 Corinthians 7:9). In his view, married people’s inevitable anxiety about “the affairs of the world” and pleasing their spouses distracts them from devotion to God (1 Corinthians 7:32–35); he believed that same-sex relations, consequences of idolatry, were even worse (Romans 1:26–27). Because more positive theological assessments of marriage initially built on civic concerns about procreation, clear lines of paternal descent, and inheritance, they were by definition heterosexual. In On the Good of Marriage, St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) strengthens marriage’s theological significance by arguing that marriage, though still inferior to celibacy, is nevertheless good “on account of” its goods: “offspring, faith, sacrament.”2 Heterosexual marriage remains de rigueur because only the intention to procreate can excuse the normally intemperate pleasure of marital intercourse. “Love” and “charity” appear in the document more as the byproducts than the causes of matrimony, which nevertheless was not officially declared a sacrament until the thirteenth century. Even so, in the post-Tridentine Douay Catechism, marriage is a sacrament

because it is a contract whereon depends the chief happiness of a married life; as being ordained for the restraint of sinful concupiscence, the good of posterity, the well ordering our domestic affairs, and the education of our children in the fear and service of God, and therefore ought to be ranked in the highest order of those actions, which Christ hath sanctioned for the use of man.3

Again, practical, civic aims reign, and the grace to “love, honour, and comfort one another” is more the sacrament’s consequence than its cause.4

From Love as Outcome to Love as Foundation

By 1930, though, the idea of marriage as a partnership rooted in romantic love—the prerequisite of the idea that heterosexuality might not be essential to matrimony—took hold in Rome. Pius XI’s Casti Connubii declared that “husband and wife are not forbidden to consider” marital intercourse’s secondary aims of “mutual aid, the cultivating of mutual love, and the quieting of concupiscence” as long as they do not thwart the primary procreative purpose of sex.5 In 1968, Pope Paul VI pronounced that “the unitive significance and the procreative significance . . . are both inherent to the marriage act.” Affective love and procreation were now on equal footing.6

In Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Amoris Laetitia the transition to modern, romantic views of marriage is complete. Lovers’ existing love “finds expression in marriage,” a “risk and a bold gamble” that, when celebrated publicly in the sacrament, “indicates and protects the ‘yes’ which those persons speak freely and unreservedly to each other.”7 Marriage is a “friendship marked by passion”: “God loves the enjoyment felt by human beings,” which is a “gift from God.” Indeed, because “pleasure can find different expressions at different times of life,” couples should “expand [their] consciousness” and pursue “the broadening and perfection” of desire.8

To his appreciation for the joy and pleasure of married sex, Francis adds the grace of marriage, which “strengthen[s] and elevate[s]” a couple’s original love in a “constant process of growth”9 elaborated in his extended exegesis of St. Paul’s hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13:4–7.10 In fact, after the love that unites us to God, conjugal love is the “greatest form of friendship.” It is a union possessing all the traits of a good friendship: concern for the good of the other, reciprocity, intimacy, warmth, stability, and the resemblance born of a shared life.11

“In a spirit of solidarity with others,” this graced intimate love also spills over to parents, children, other relatives, and “the good of society as a whole.”12 Justice work renews marital love, and marital love feeds justice work. If Burke Ravizza’s interviewees had been looking for a description of the sacramental grace they have experienced in their marriages, they could not have done much better than the Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti, whom Pope Francis quotes:

Your hands are my caress,
The harmony that fills my days.
I love you because your hands
Work for justice.
If I love you, it is because you are
My love, my companion and my all,
And on the street, side by side,
We are much more than just two.13

Finally, Francis laments that in church teaching these elements of marriage are so often “overshadowed by an almost exclusive insistence on the duty of procreation.”14 Granted, citing Gaudium et Spes, the Catechism insists “by its very nature the institution of marriage and married love is ordered to the procreation and education of the offspring and it is in them that it finds its crowning glory.”15 Yet, Francis recalls, Gaudium et Spes also says that “marriage was not instituted solely for the procreation of children.”16 (Sterility, once an impediment to heterosexual Catholic marriage, no longer is.) Because procreation and even adoption are only two of many ways to fulfill the marital calling to fruitfulness,17 as Burke Ravizza also notes (75–76), even a childless heterosexual “marriage still retains its character of being a whole manner and communion of life, and preserves its value and indissolubility.”18 Thus, Francis centers romance, passion, love, and fruitfulness—including justice work—in heterosexual sacramental marriage in exactly the same terms in which Burke Ravizza’s gay and lesbian subjects describe their marriages.

If procreation is not essential to sacramental marriage, the last shred of a gendered argument against same-sex marriage is that, if children are to develop healthy identities, they must grow up in a household with a heterosexual married couple who can model fully realized womanhood and manhood and their collaboration.19 The mistakes here are imagining that children are sequestered in the household, away from other adult models, and that cooperation between women and collaboration between men are less important lessons to learn. If raising children truly takes a village, it makes more sense to acknowledge the wider, interdependent, diverse community of adults that weaves a complex network of support around them. This—and not one or two parents stubbornly attempting self-sufficiency—is the model children ideally see.

To be sure, the vast majority of sacramentally married Catholic couples not only desire to have and raise children but do so, and they probably always will, as part of their vocation of “charity, of hospitality, and of sacrifice.”20 Yet Francis devotes a whole chapter to families’ need for more support in raising children—exactly what most of the gay and lesbian couples in Burke Ravizza’s book spend much of their energy providing to nieces, nephews, students, and even their own children. So Amoris Laetitia’s rejection of same-sex marriage as selfish, unfruitful, individualistic, and unnatural, in no “way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family,” and even contradicting this plan, rings hollow.21 Does Pope Francis truly believe that their own children are the only things standing between married couples and moral vice? Do he and his colleagues see children as means to their parents’ moral formation rather than as ends in themselves?

In the end Amoris Laetitia’s vision of marriage does not cohere with the understanding of gender that was essential to earlier theologies of marriage in which marital sex was an outlet for (troublesome, not divinely given) desire, and procreation was the good by which that intemperate pleasure was grudgingly excused. To be sure, Pope John Paul II tried to paper over this gaping crack; his failure must be a project for another day. For now, The Sacrament of Same-Sex Marriage makes this choice unavoidable: Catholics must either return to a fully Augustinian, Tridentine understanding of marriage, gender, and procreation, or we must let go of heterosexuality as a condition of official sacramental marriage altogether. Burke Ravizza and her subjects show us which option makes the best use of love.

Many arguments have been made that recognize the morality of same-sex marriage. But that’s not the question for Bridget Burke Ravizza: she invites us not to recognize that same-sex marriage is (or can be) a moral good, but that it is a sacrament. This book draws from and continues the work she began in Project Holiness: Marriage as a Workshop for Everyday Saints, where, in collaboration with Julie Massey, she surveyed and interviewed opposite-sex couples to explore the “lived sacramentality” of marriage: how spouses are “sacraments to one another; . . . sacraments to others; and sacraments in daily married and family life.”1 That book was a phenomenology of marriage—how is that sacrament experienced and lived in the lives of those promised its grace? Her argument here about same-sex couples is essentially: “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck,” then the Church should recognize its anatine status. In a rich and moving engagement with same-sex couples connected to the Church, she concludes that “the church should expand its definition of sacramental marriage to include same-sex couples.”2

The reluctance of Catholic leadership to recognize same-sex marriage as a sacrament is not surprising. It took long enough to recognize the sacramentality of heterosexual marriage. Christian tradition has never condemned marriage outright, seeing it as a natural good instituted by God. But from the early centuries onward, Catholic tradition has held marriage in an uneasy tension with celibacy. It was only in the twelfth century that marriage was considered sacramental in the specific sense accorded to the other six sacraments.3 Part of this is due to its shaky scriptural foundation: sacraments are defined as being instituted by Christ, but it is the water-into-wine miracle at Cana that is adduced as scriptural evidence for the sacramentality of marriage. Saying that marriage is a sacrament because Jesus performed a miracle at a wedding is like saying swimming is a sacrament because Jesus healed a man by the pool of Siloam.

But other factors contributed to the slow recognition of marriage as a sacrament by the Church. First, many in the early Church looked for Jesus’s imminent return—don’t bother yourself with this world, but prepare for its end. Stay married if you’re married, don’t marry if you’re not, and don’t order long magazine subscriptions. The exception noted by Paul is for those who would be distracted from focusing on the eschaton by sexual desire, “for it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.”4

Also, there was a sense in the early Church that the biological family would be eclipsed by the Christian community itself. This also has a root in scripture: when Jesus’s family came to bring him home after hearing that “He has gone out of his mind,” Jesus turned to his followers and said: “‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers!’”5 The Christian community provided chosen family for widows, other vulnerable people, and for those who left everything behind in service of the gospel.

A significant reason for slow recognition of marriage’s sacramental nature is due to its uncomfortable association with the dangerous pleasure of sex. Writings from the early centuries of Church tradition are full of warnings about and condemnations of sex. The lapsed Manichee Augustine is most well-known for this; he saw sexual desire and the unruliness of sex organs themselves as paradigmatic of the disordered state of post-lapsarian humanity. For Augustine, sex can only be sinless in marriage, and even then only if one intended procreation or sought to ease one’s spouse’s concupiscence without surrendering inordinately to pleasure oneself.

Of these three main factors contributing to Christian ambivalence about marriage, only the third remains. The hope for Jesus’s imminent return has been dashed for centuries. While we continue to look for Jesus’s second coming, it strains experience for us to expect it will happen any time soon. And the apparent opposition of Christian community and biological family has been largely overcome. The Vatican II document Lumen Gentium spoke of the family as “so to speak, the domestic church,” in which spouses “help each other to attain to holiness in their married life and in the rearing and education of their children.”6

The Catholic tradition’s discomfort with sex,7 even in marriage, was allayed by focusing on its procreative potential. Until the twentieth century, marriage was taught to be principally a context for procreation, with other goods subsidiary to that principal end. Marital sex is sanctified by the possibility of procreation. Lumen Gentium again: “From the wedlock of Christians there comes the family, in which new citizens of human society are born, who by the grace of the Holy Spirit received in baptism are made children of God, thus perpetuating the people of God through the centuries.”8

However, another Vatican II document upset the apple cart of the primacy of procreation as an end of marriage. “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the begetting and educating of children,”9 we read in Gaudium et Spes. However, the same paragraph states:

Marriage to be sure is not instituted solely for procreation; rather, its very nature as an unbreakable compact between persons, and the welfare of the children, both demand that the mutual love of the spouses be embodied in a rightly ordered manner, that it grow and ripen. Therefore, marriage persists as a whole manner and communion of life, and maintains its value and indissolubility, even when despite the often intense desire of the couple, offspring are lacking.10

This communion of life can be seen as an equal end with procreation in current magisterial teaching, with one important caveat. While non-procreative unions are still truly marriage, loveless-but-procreative unions are never affirmed. The raising of love to an equal end of marriage with procreation, while affirming non-procreative unions, in fact relativizes the important good of procreation. And while antecedent and permanent impotence is canon-legal grounds for annulling a marriage, infertility is not. As Burke Ravizza notes, “There is room already in the tradition for couples to be sacramentally married while unable to naturally conceive children.”11 It is also the case, she says, that many same-sex couples do parent children, and further provide the broader ecclesial and social context in which children and others are cared for, cherished, and blessed into being and becoming their best selves.

But if procreation is no longer the primary end of marriage for Catholics, someone should have told the Vatican. The Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith addressed the question of civil recognition of same-sex unions in 2003 in a document signed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). The objections he raised default to procreation (or to the asserted complementarity of the male and female, surely a petitio principii in a document on same-sex relationships: it amounts to saying “same-sex relationships are bad because they’re not opposite-sex”).12 Even civil same-sex unions were an affront to the Church according to this document, largely because they would not be procreative.

In sum, marriage was a latecomer to the sacraments. In the early Church, several reasons contributed to ambivalence about marriage, but one that still stands is ambivalence about sex, which was dealt with by pointing to the procreative potential of sex. For centuries, procreation was held to be the principal end of marriage, a stance fundamentally changed, if not upended, by the Vatican II raising of spousal love to an equal end with procreation, saying also that failure to procreate does not vitiate the sacrament. And when the Vatican’s doctrinal office addressed same-sex civil unions, the best arguments they could come up with were about procreation.

But Burke Ravizza asks us to think about sacramentality, and the sacramentality of a marriage cannot be reduced to a biological process like procreation any more than the sacramentality of Eucharist can be reduced to the details of digestion. A sacrament is an efficacious promise of grace, and the sacrament of matrimony is an offer of transformation and courage to strengthen and sustain partners as they live their vocations as agents of the Reign of God. If non-procreative heterosexual marriage can be sacramental, why can’t non-procreative same-sex marriage be sacramental?

“But wait,” some might say, “marriage involves sex, and same-sex sex is condemned by magisterial teaching.” And of course that’s precisely what Luis F. Cardinal Ladria, SI, said in 2021 when his Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was asked about blessing same-sex unions:

it is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex.13

So we circle around to the question of the morality of same-sex marriage, which, for Church leaders, hinges on the morality of same-sex sex (and the absurd statement that sex in same-sex relationships is extramarital because the Church doesn’t admit those relationships to its sacramental life—in other words, “we don’t allow them to marry, so it’s extramarital sex”).

Ultimately, to settle the issue of the sacramentality of same-sex marriage, the question of the morality of same-sex sex has to be addressed, as Burke Ravizza notes. One way to ask that question is to employ the traditional tools of the moral tradition—and that work has been done. At the very least, it is fair to say that magisterial teaching on sexual ethics could bear an update with attention to contemporary experience and scientific knowledge, with renewed focus on the gospel priorities of justice, mercy, and love of neighbor, and perhaps a more analytical and historically informed view of the discernments of those in earlier eras in the tradition.

Another way to investigate the sacramentality of same-sex marriage is to ask whether the graces received and lived by couples in same-sex relationships resemble the graces received and lived by opposite-sex couples. Burke Ravizza’s findings offer a resounding “yes.” The magisterium’s stark and harsh “no” to same-sex relationships seems not to have prevented the Holy Spirit from sparking, enlivening, strengthening, and sustaining those relationships in ways that are strikingly parallel to the Spirit’s action in opposite-sex relationships. And if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck . . .

Of course, the big difference for same-sex couples in the Church is exactly this magisterial disapproval. Burke Ravizza documents the ways in which same-sex couples have been rejected and harmed by the institutional Church, along with stories of Catholics who have supported and encouraged them in their faith and their relationships. But even if partnered lesbian and gay people (along with bisexual people in same-sex relationships) are accepted on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis in their parishes and as employees of Church-related institutions, often it is marriage that is the deal-breaker. It is the public affirmation of love and responsibility14 that leads to their dismissal, not the relationship itself.

For me as a moral theologian, that’s the key outrage. What is being opposed by Church leaders when they punish gay people for marrying is this: the daring and grace-empowered willingness of two people to stand up in public and promise before God, trusting in God’s help, that they will strive to love and care for each other, knowing that such love and care will reach beyond themselves to their families, their communities, and the world. What Church leaders oppose when they punish gay people for marrying is a lot like what Gaudium et Spes said about marriage:

This love is an eminently human one since it is directed from one person to another through an affection of the will; it involves the good of the whole person, and therefore can enrich the expressions of body and mind with a unique dignity, ennobling these expressions as special ingredients and signs of the friendship distinctive of marriage. This love God has judged worthy of special gifts, healing, perfecting and exalting gifts of grace and of charity. Such love, merging the human with the divine, leads the spouses to a free and mutual gift of themselves, a gift providing itself by gentle affection and by deed, such love pervades the whole of their lives: indeed by its busy generosity it grows better and grows greater.15

Why would Catholic leaders want to stand in the way of grace? Why would they want to stand in the way of that distinct friendship, blessed by God, that so suffuses the lives of all who are touched by it?

Burke Ravizza ends with a plea for the Church to recognize the sacramentality of same-sex marriage, and to become sanctuary, a safe space, set apart, “‘cocreated by relationships of mutual vulnerability and risk.’”16 I would say yes to sanctuary, but there must be more. The Church should be a place of positive celebration of marriage for LGBTQ+ persons. The celebration is for the evident grace that gay marriages can shine forth, for the witness they bear to the faithfulness of God to all God’s children, and for the startling human capacity to love beyond ourselves, even to the ends of the earth.

And I suspect—I trust—that through the long centuries before Church leaders finally recognized the sacramentality of heterosexual marriage, that marriage was already a possible medium of the grace of the Holy Spirit to the people of God. Marriage already was the kind of place where a Guest might turn water into wine in sheer exuberance, just to keep the celebration going. And I suspect—I trust—that same-sex marriage likewise is already a medium of the grace of the Holy Spirit to the people of God, even if blinkered and cranky Church leaders can’t see it yet. The Spirit is always already ahead of us, calling us into love, blessing us into joy, and changing the water of our everyday lives into the very best wine.

Bridget Burke Ravizza’s The Sacrament of Same-Sex Marriage concludes by invoking Cardinal McElroy’s beautiful message on synodality as a journey of conversion (181). The entire book, in my view, is a prime example of synodality in action. Burke Ravizza’s engagement with the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ Catholics in same-sex marriages models for the broader Church a form of transformative listening, which is captured in the book’s central argument: that, based on the witness of Catholics in same-sex marriages, the Catholic Church would do well to expand its understanding of sacramental marriage to fully include same-sex couples (2–3). Following this spirit of transformative listening, prior to articulating a response to Burke Ravizza, I wish to frame my remarks through the lenses of synodal ecclesiology and queer theology.

First, at the heart of a synodal ecclesiology is the concept of the sensus fidelium. In the words of Ormond Rush, “Revelation is happening here and now, and the Spirit’s gift of sensus fidei enables its faithful interpretation . . . God continues to surprise us and provoke us. And the sensus fidei is the antenna for sensing those surprises and provocations.”1 This imbues the laity with a certain competency to discern and respond to how God calls them to live and to communicate it to the Church. Catholics in same-sex marriages, through their baptism, form a part of the sensus fidelium, and Burke Ravizza’s work illustrates how the Church can be transformed by their witness through the synodal process. Grzegorz Strzelczyk keenly observes, “in its very essence, synodality is associated with the possibility of an epiphany of the Holy Spirit. In other words: Every gathering in which the synodality of the Church is realized is (at least potentially) an epiphany of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, expectation of this epiphany should be the reason for such a gathering.”2 Burke Ravizza’s work prophetically calls the church to synodally epiphanically develop its conception of marital sacramentality, as captured in her central argument. She addresses same-sex marriage not only as a matter of inclusion, but also as a matter of active integration whereby LGBTQ+ persons actively shape how the Church thinks about sexuality, relationships, and sacramentality. This methodological shift toward a queer-inclusive synodal Church frames my discussion beyond “LGBTQ+” identity and folds in a queer epistemological lens.

Second, queer epistemologies embrace disruption, transgression, and anti-normativity. As several scholars (including me) have argued before, a queer theological framework can unfold within particular confessional or theological frameworks (e.g., Catholicism) when a queer epistemology is synthesized with key principles of the particular tradition.3 Obviously, some queer scholars disagree, cautioning us not to fall into the trap Audre Lorde warned us about when she reminded us that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Nonetheless, in my commentary, I invoke a queer theological epistemology to further disrupt and challenge some forms of oppressive and exclusive normativity that may still be perpetuated by same-sex couples within Catholicism.

My main discussion question, which is beyond the scope of this book and beyond how the Church and society currently understand marriage, is: how does The Sacrament of Same-Sex Marriage help us think about sexual and relational sacramentality beyond heteronormative monogamy? A cornerstone of this book is the author’s commitment to several key theological principles pertaining to Catholic sacramental marriages such as fidelity (18), holiness (26), grace (26), complementarity (63), and procreativity (44)—all of which can arguably be deployed to sustain monogamous heteronormativity, even among same-sex couples. And this can be oppressive toward some queer persons whose lives and relationships do not neatly fit these categories but who nevertheless witness other virtues (dare I say grace) in their sexual and romantic relationships. Here I invoke synodality and queer theology to propose further epiphanic listening to other folks in the queer non-heteronormative community.

Engaging a Queer Epistemology of Sacramentality

Resembling a Catholic conception of a family unit, I observe that, unless they chose to not disclose otherwise in the interviews, many of the interviewees in this book structured their relationships as monogamous, which (gender identity and procreation aside) resembles a heteronormative relationship model. Conversely, in my experience ministering with LGBTQ+ Catholics for over fifteen years and in my experience living as a queer Catholic in San Francisco, I have encountered a significant amount (perhaps even a majority) of queer relationships that are polyamorous, open, and/or that incorporate non-traditional elements into their relationship dynamics such as kink, BDSM, and non-permanence. I wonder how sacramentality, grace, and holiness—as explored by Burke Ravizza—apply to these queer relationships (if at all). Obviously, the Church is more likely to accept monogamous same-sex marriage sooner, since heteronormativity makes these unions more digestible by preserving these categories that are shared between heterosexual and same-sex monogamous couples. Nonetheless, with this question, I am opting to go beyond pragmatism and toward an ideal vision of full inclusivity by dwelling on the “marginalized of the marginalized”: non-heteronormative queers.

Here I share three personal stories from my time as a parishioner and minister to a large group of over forty LGBTQ+ young adults at Most Holy Redeemer (MHR) Church in the Castro gayborhood of San Francisco:

1. In 2015, my mother came to visit me in San Francisco, and I decided to take her to the Castro Street Fair. Mother dearest entered a state of shock when she saw several individuals walking around the streets completely naked (a normal sight in San Francisco, but a scandal to my progressive Puerto Rican mother). To soothe her, I decided to walk her over to MHR’s booth, where she had a lovely five-minute conversation with a nun who was working at the Church booth amidst the nudists. My goal was to get the nun to tell my mom how good of a Catholic I am despite living in this “deviant” neighborhood. It didn’t work. My mother fled the scene shortly after while verbally assailing my apparently sinful lifestyle.
2. In 2016, I was attending Sunday Mass sitting next to my fellow young adult parishioner Mikey (pseudonym) when, as I hugged him during the sign of peace, I noticed he was wearing something hard and lumpy under his button-down dress shirt. When I asked him what was under his shirt, he answered, “Oh, I am wearing my leather harness because, after Mass, I am going to Folsom Street Fair” [a world-renowned kink and BDSM festival in San Francisco]. He was attending with several of the other young adults, and he invited me. I joined them and, after a few hours walking around witnessing sexually provocative leather outfits, public floggings, puppy play (google at your own risk), pornography (producing and consuming), and many other things not suitable for a Syndicate post, the young adults and I found a secluded booth in a nearby bar and began to debrief our experience over beer. We had a beautifully vulnerable conversation about what we considered to be the key virtues of sexuality, relationships, and marriage. Consent, health, safety, freedom, creative exploration, emotional intelligence, a reasonable degree of concern for the other, and communication made the list, which is a different list (though not entirely) from what Burke Ravizza synthesized from her interviews.
3. In 2017, after Easter Sunday Mass and brunch, the MHR young adults and I went to Dolores Park to enjoy the annual Hunky Jesus Contest hosted by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (definitely google them). As you may imagine, this irreverent pageant is a combination of body building, kink, and campy queer ballroom following the theme of the Risen Lord. It was interesting to me that this young adult Church group seamlessly added this queer contest to their Triduum celebration for years to come. (Fun fact: one of those subsequent years, the winner of the contest was a fellow teacher at a local Catholic school.) Thus, Hunky Jesus has become an integral part of our Easter tradition!

To some, these scenarios might appear to contain blatant violations of human dignity and disrespect to Christianity, but I see them as a crucial part through which queer Catholic young adults in San Francisco integrated their embodied self with their Catholic spirituality. Castro Street Fair, Folsom Street Fair, and the Hunky Jesus Contest provided an avenue for grace-filled conversation, faith exploration, and spiritual growth! To others, these vignettes might seem emblematic of a queer culture and unique to LGBTQ+ persons, since queers historically deploy such overt, provocative, and irreverent sexual behaviors to defiantly seek liberation from heteronormative expectations. However, these nontraditional relationship practices are also quite present in heterosexual culture (e.g., swinger couples). The more I learn about the sexual lives of both queer and non-queer persons, the more I discover that these practices are increasingly prevalent among all US Americans. Thus, I revisit the question: do the concepts of sacramentality, grace, and holiness extend to these relational configurations and sexual practices? Or are these practices a product of sin, immorality, and the breaking down of our societal values? Obviously, my experiences with the young adults at MHR—and dare I say the sensus fidei of these queer Catholics—indicated the former might be true, which is why I seek to articulate this in conversation with Burke Ravizza’s The Sacrament of Same-Sex Marriage.

Entering a Queer Conversation

The Sacrament of Same-Sex Marriage already flirts with queer theology. In her discussion on complementarity and gender (63), Burke Ravizza engages the work of Susannah Cornwall on intersex identities to disrupt cisnormativity and heteronormativity. In another article, titled “The Future of Sexuality Debates in the Church: Shared Challenges and Opportunities for Theological ‘Traditionalists’ and ‘Revisionists,’” Cornwall addresses non-binary genders, polyamory, and kink through a Christian theological lens. For example, she draws parallels between non-binary identities and faithful generative co-creation; between polyamory and the idea of communion among all Christians; and between BDSM/kink and Christian rituals that involve pain and subjugation (e.g., flagellation, fasting, and ritualization of suffering to get closer to Christ). These practices enshrine virtues akin to the ones my young adults group enumerated, posing a legitimate challenge to a heteronormative monogamy grounded in fidelity, complementarity, and procreativity. As Cornwall observes, “Same-sex marriage may mean more people can access the (pragmatic) benefits afforded to marriage, but it still leaves many others out in the cold.”4

In another example of queer theology that disrupts heteronormativity, queer Catholic scholar Craig A. Ford Jr. connects queerness with the human conscientious drive to flourish. His article, “Transgender Bodies, Catholic Schools, and a Queer Natural Law Theology of Exploration,” builds upon the work of Jean Porter by arguing that a natural law methodology does not yield an extensive list of moral principles, but rather a small set of general guidelines. Ford then asserts that the natural law encompasses an inclination to explore and conceptualize embodied identities that lead us to flourish. Thus, he discredits rigid theologies on gender binaries and complementarity and constructs a queer natural law theology of exploration. In his words, “if any identity is presumed, it is only that of a seeker. The rest I leave to our personal experiences of conscience, of community, and of the various ways we investigate the phenomenon of human life.”5

While Cornwall’s and Ford’s queer theology addresses spirituality and the natural law tradition respectively, I wonder how Burke Ravizza’s book enters this conversation through the lens of ritual and sacramentality. By listening to the experiences of Catholics who have ritualized their same-sex marriages, Burke Ravizza is modeling a synodal Church that not only welcomes queer persons, but also seriously considers their experiences as a catalyst for epiphanic transformation. She is already participating in the act of “queering” simply by disrupting the gender binary often presumed in monogamous couples. But I wonder if she would be willing to push her method toward a queer sacramental relationality beyond monogamous heteronormativity. Furthermore, I wonder: can LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Catholic Church be fully attained if we perpetuate heteronormative norms for same-sex relationships? If not, then what is the solution? Do we discard these principles of fidelity, complementarity, mutuality, and fruitfulness in favor of freedom, co-creativity, and expression? Or would that take things too far? Again, it bears repeating that these questions fall outside the scope of Burke Ravizza’s book, which addresses same-sex sacramental marriage for couples—something I very much support and hope to participate in one day with my same-sex partner. I am simply pushing a queer agenda on her work.

I thank you for your prophetic book and look forward to our conversation.

Bridget Burke Ravizza’s inclusive vision for the Church could not be more timely and, given what is transpiring thus far in 2025, feels more urgent with every passing day.1 The Catholic Church’s trenchant fear of liberation for women and LGBTQIA+ persons is abetting a political program in the United States that has undermined the dignity and rights of queer persons, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, people of color, children, elders, and all those who depend on the social safety net for survival. This ideological bent, occupying so many positions of power, is poised to do much worse with global ramifications for relationships among nations and the environment. It is erasing the history and experience of LGBTQIA+ persons as at the Stonewall National Monument, eliminating or leaving global aid programs for which the LGBTQIA+ community has fought so valiantly like UNAIDS, defunding scientific research (including medical research) that can help us understand ourselves, one another, and the world better.

Recent magisterial interventions into theological conversations about human dignity, marriage, and family life frequently rely on outdated “straw person” arguments about sex and gender that are disconnected from both the actual scholarly claims of theologians and ethicists and the reality of people’s lives. The Sacrament of Same-Sex Marriage is setting the standard for scholars who are positioned to listen to and share the beauty and the challenges of people’s experiences with family life, presenting the lived experience of the body of Christ in its many incarnations. Members of a Church who adopt this inclusive posture with and for LGBTQIA+ persons, couples, and families must now mobilize to advocate for the civil and human rights of all LGBTQIA+ persons. Justice and liberation for all hang in the balance.

Moral theologian Jacob Kohlhaas and I have gathered commentary on the documentary heritage of Catholic magisterial teaching on the family since the late nineteenth century in Modern Catholic Family Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations (Georgetown University Press, 2024). The project had a number of goals, among them a careful analysis of teaching on family life in its dynamic relationship to Catholic social teaching more broadly considered that moves beyond apologetics, leveraging international collaboration and insight for both the critical reception of the documents and the future trajectory of the field. Contributors to the volume noted the missed opportunities, inconsistencies, and betrayals of the gospel throughout the history of the Church. Yet, they remained hopeful. As Kohlhaas and I wrote in our conclusion to the volume:

The world church, this family of families, can indeed do what families of all shapes and sizes do best: provide for and welcome one another, seek and offer forgiveness, navigate the claims of self-care, fidelity, and justice, educate for solidarity with the vulnerable, reach across difference, and hand on the stories and practices that shape us from generation to generation. The Church, the people of God, the body of Christ is happening. It arises in families, around kitchen tables, beside sick beds, on the dangerous routes of migration, in moments of celebration and loss, and so much quotidian muddling through (260).

We remain committed to that vision of family life for the Church even as recent documents and pronouncements from the Vatican and initiatives within the US Catholic Church have equivocated on the dignity of all people and families. Fiducia Supplicans (FS) and Dignitatis Infinita (DI) are cases in point, all exacerbated by Pope Francis’s reported use of homophobic slurs in discussions about vocations to the priesthood. FS was viewed as a “small big step forward” in LGBTQIA+ inclusion and pastoral care because it opened the possibility for LGBTQIA+ persons to receive blessings.

Ultimately, a blessing offers people a means to increase their trust in God. The request for a blessing, thus, expresses and nurtures openness to the transcendence, mercy, and closeness to God in a thousand concrete circumstances of life, which is no small thing in the world in which we live. It is a seed of the Holy Spirit that must be nurtured, not hindered (FS 33).

Yet, ultimately, the back-and-forth of responses and clarifications regarding the message of the document was disheartening: blessings are for individuals, the Vatican clarified, not couples nor the graced union between them.

The aim of DI, according to the Presentation by Víctor Manuel Cardinal Fernández, “is to offer some points for reflection that can help us maintain an awareness of human dignity amid the complex historical moment in which we are living.” Paragraph 55 reads:

The Church wishes, first of all, “to reaffirm that every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration, while ‘every sign of unjust discrimination’ is to be carefully avoided, particularly any form of aggression and violence.” For this reason, it should be denounced as contrary to human dignity the fact that, in some places, not a few people are imprisoned, tortured, and even deprived of the good of life solely because of their sexual orientation (DI 55).

Yet, two paragraphs later DI raises the specter of the straw person of “gender theory” in ways that misrepresent the lived experiences of women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ persons:

Regarding gender theory, whose scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts, the Church recalls that human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God. This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good. Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel (DI 57).

Ultimately, claims about the intrinsic dignity of the person created in God’s image and likeness in DI were undercut by repeated tropes about “gender ideology,” reproductive justice, and the lives of LGBTQIA+, particularly trans, persons. In the US, the Conference of Catholic Bishops unveiled a repackaging of their “Marriage: Unique for a Reason” campaign which now goes under the banner “Love Means More” and includes an interactive website that continues to advocate for sexist and anti-LGBTQIA+ policies and practices while at the same time claiming to be not sexist, homophobic, or transphobic.2

It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain that there is “a baby in the bathwater,” something worth preserving amid what we might prefer to discard, amid Catholic teaching about marriage and family life. I wonder if the teaching is too tainted by misogyny and homophobia to claim any connection to the gospel or the reign of God. The temptation to despair is great, but in some ways, despair is a luxury of the straight, cisgendered, white folks in Church- and state-sanctioned relationships. Advocates for families, LGBTQIA+ families in particular, cannot go down the path of despair. Theological ethicists who strive to ally themselves and their work with families must Acknowledge and respect the experiences of others, Listen in order to understand, Leverage the access and influence their work affords, and Yield the floor to queer families.3

Bridget Burke Ravizza practices this kind of allyship in The Sacrament of Same-Sex Marriage. The book is framed as a response to an invitation to listen with “the openness of the heart” that is called for in Fratelli Tutti (xii), but perhaps even more importantly, to the invitation extended over and over again by LGBTQIA+ couples and families. Burke Ravizza conducted in-depth interviews with over twenty same-sex couples who have meaningful, if complicated, relationships to the Catholic tradition, enabling the Church as a whole to hear the witness of these couples and their love.

While the Vatican, in the wake of FS’s promulgation, has strained to avoid any “confusion” about what blessing a gay couple might imply, Burke Ravizza makes the unequivocal assertion that the couples with whom she entered into transformative conversation are living sacramental marriages in families that are striving for holiness. She is clear that the spouses are sacraments to each other, that they and their families are sacraments to the community, and that they engage in the sacramental practices that are the stuff of family life (1). Because Burke Ravizza has listened with “the ear of the heart,” she is able to hear, really hear and stand in awe of the grace at work in the lives of queer couples and families and how they experience, in the words of one interviewee, “A sliver of how God must love someone so much, like me. A new depth of awareness of unconditional love. Deep, vast, wide admiration and joy and honor” (9). These couples and families are “making God visible in the world” in ways both profound and mundane (13). They are drawing strength and sustenance from the sacrament of their relationship, “The holy and sacred space between people where God shows up” (15). They experience the mercy of God who is with them and for them through all of life’s trials and tribulations, caused in no small part by rejection from family, community, and Church. Love means more indeed.

A practice of deep and reverent listening, keenly aware that she was in the presence of something and someone sacred, opened the way for Burke Ravizza to learn and then to leverage her theological acumen to bring the stories of queer couples and families together in a compelling argument for the sacrament of same-sex marriage—or rather, the argument that the Church must recognize and honor the de facto sacramentality of these relationships in word and deed. Because The Sacrament of Same-Sex Marriage also yields the floor to the words of the couples interviewed, their stories stay with the reader every bit as much as Burke Ravizza’s theological insight. These are the experiences absent from so many documents and pronouncements and without which our theological ethics of sacrament and sacramentality is compromised. Failure to recognize the sacramental nature of the marriages highlighted in The Sacrament of Same-Sex Marriage suggests an inability to understand and honor any marriage and family, even those undertaken by cisgender heterosexual couples.

Burke Ravizza has articulated a vision for the Catholic Church and its institutions that is true to the gospel, to the best information we have about sex, gender, and family life, to the sacramental tradition within the Church, and to the lived experiences of couples and families. It has ethical implications for how the Catholic Church and its members operate internally and participate in the life of civil society and the advancement of the common good. It demands steadfast commitment to the sacramentality and legality of same-sex marriage and parenting. It demands a struggle to keep literature that speaks from the perspectives of queer persons on the shelves of our libraries and to keep queer history alive in our classrooms. It demands welcome for LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers. It may demand “choosing scandal” (169, 173) and engaging civil disobedience. God is showing up in queer families and all spaces of vulnerability and so ought the Church.