 Good evening everyone. Thank you all for being here, this nice healthy crowd in here and masses and masses of people online. So to all of you, welcome. My name is Paul Lakeland. I direct the Center for Catholic Studies and I'm delighted to be here to say a few words and then get out of the way for the O'Callaghan lecture on women in church and society. So I have just one piece of housekeeping which I got used to doing now for the people online. I will be monitoring the Q&A box which you can see on your Zoom screens and anytime any of you has a question or a polite comment that you would like to offer, you can just type it in and I will have it on the screen and at the end of the event we'll be able to handle at least some of the questions and comments that come through. So the important thing for you online is when you think of a question type it in. Don't wait you might forget and I will be watching those. So that's the piece of housekeeping. So the other thing I have to do is introduce the introducer briefly. So some of you, most of you perhaps, at least most of you have put the front here and many of the people online who attend this lecture every year will remember that two years ago we had the lecture on Zoom because we weren't able to meet together and our lecturer then was sister Colleen Gibson who did a great job and she was introduced by her friend Elise Rabie. Well, of course Colleen who is currently studying at Boston College and who's claimed to fame at Fairfield, she'll be embarrassed by this, was that when she left Fairfield, she left Fairfield as A, the valedictorian and B, the captain of the women's rugby team. So we've turned the tables and Colleen is going to introduce Elise. At the end of Elise's presentation we'll have time for questions and comments and challenges if you wish. So without or due, Colleen. I did omit to say one very important thing. So this event is of course an event sponsored by the O'Callaghan family and the man who I have to call the patriarch of the O'Callaghan family, Joe O'Callaghan Senior, had a fall today. Not a serious one I gather. So he is one of the multitude online and we are sorry we will not have his august presence in person. I almost forgot to say that very important thing. Wonderful. Well, thank you Paul. It's a pleasure to be here in person. You know, Zoom was not quite the same. So to be able to see people in the flesh and be together and to talk about bodies, I think it's good that we're here in person together. As Paul said, this year we mark the 22nd annual Andromio Callaghan lecture on women in the church. Just to give you a little bit of background, if you look on the back of your program, you'll see a picture of Anne. But this annual lecture honors Anne's life and legacy as a devoted catechist, an advocate for the intellectually disabled, minister to young people, and director of religious education. Anne embodied the good news that she shared with those she served. She gave life to the body of Christ and she claimed women's rightful place as members equal and empowered in that body. And so we're so grateful to be here together to be able to share in this conversation. This year we welcome Dr. Elise Raby as she invites us to consider the question whose body is the body of Christ. Dr. Raby is assistant professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University where she's taught since 2021. As a Catholic systematic theologian, her research focuses on the areas of ecclesiology and theological anthropology. She has secondary interests in feminist theology and issues of gender and sexuality. As a teacher, she invites her students to consider a Catholic imagination and what its implications have on the way we live our contemporary lives. And also she calls the church to account and calls her students to critically analyze the church and think of it lives up to its own standards. In the words of her students, she is passionate and empowering. She's intellectually demanding and well spoken and perhaps of highest acclaim they describe her as the best religion teacher I've ever had. And I quote, so dope. Tonight's lecture analyzing the metaphor of the church as body in 19th and 20th century Catholic theology and its implications for the church and its faithful is the fruit of her dissertation. And it will also be the subject of her first book which we all eagerly await, no pressure, at least, yeah, no pressure. In addition to this project, Dr. Raby's recent work includes articles and papers on the possibility of women deacons in the Catholic church, the potential of metaphor in systematic ecclesiology, and the development of a realized theology of the vocation of the single life. Dr. Raby holds a PhD from Boston College, a master's in theological studies from Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, and most noteworthy tonight a bachelor's of arts in religious studies from Fairfield University where she was a member of the class of 2008. Many here, some of you, will recall that she also served a tenure in the Center for Catholic Studies between 2010 and 2013 after she spent a year serving in Guaiquil, Ecuador, as a member of Rooster de Cristo. It was here at Fairfield that I first met Dr. Raby. In fact, it was 17 years ago, this month, that we lay side by side on a dock in Ivoryton, Connecticut, as members of the Eucharistic Ministers Retreat, Stargazing. We were surrounded by people we didn't know, and we didn't know one another either. But I remember that as we looked up at the stars, one of us said to the other, maybe this is what heaven is like, and the other one replied, yeah, light united in a grand expanse, spirits forever connected, a body so much bigger than we could ever comprehend. I like to think about that. I'm not going to take credit for tonight's lecture on the body of Christ, but I can attest that that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, a friendship which has revealed to me the beauty of the body of Christ in so many ways over the last 17 years. And so, it is my distinct pleasure on behalf of the Center for Catholic Studies, Fairfield University, and the O'Callaghan family to welcome back to Fairfield, Dr. Elise Raby. Thank you, Colleen, for such a lovely introduction. It's really special that our friendship began here as women in the church, in campus ministry, and in religious studies. And now 15 years later, we've both been able to introduce the other for our respective O'Callaghan lectures. I'd also like to thank the O'Callaghan family for hosting this event every year. When I worked here in the Center for Catholic Studies, this was always one of my favorite events, because it is a testament both to the impact of a particular woman in the church, Ann O'Callaghan, but is also an annual reminder of the power and presence of so many women in the church. Women scholars who have spoken here, and the lives and voices of the women that they lift up. When colleagues and students these days ask me when or how I knew I wanted to do a PhD in theology, I tell them about the lectures that I got to help plan and attend here. I saw a litany of women theologians fully embracing their intellect for the sake of the church. And I'd watch them give a lecture over in the other, the old Don School of Business, and I'd think, I can do that. I think that's what I'll do. So my vocation as a theologian really began here on this campus, and it is truly an honor to be part of this series to have been invited by Dr. Lakeland and to be back at Fairfield with you all. In my lecture this evening, I'd like to talk about bodies. Individual bodies and social ecclesial bodies. When I was in graduate school, I often found myself wondering why we use the same term body for many different kinds of realities. On the one hand, the term body can refer to an individual fleshy person. On the other hand, though, it can refer to a collective reality, like an author's body of work, or the social term, the body politic. In a theological context, I often wondered what my body had to do with the body of Christ that is the church. How are these two bodies related to each other? My remarks tonight are the fruit of those wonderings. Ultimately, I will show that the way we think about our own bodies has direct consequences for how we think about the church, the ecclesial body, and vice versa. The way the church is structured has direct consequences for how we think about our own bodies. To get to this point, I will move in three parts. First, we will consider some insights about bodies and societies from the field of cultural anthropology. Second, we'll use that as a lens for reviewing a few key moments in Catholic history where the church is described as a body. And then finally, we'll ask what that past has to do with how the Catholic Church thinks about bodies and churches in the present, and how our concrete experiences of our bodies can help us re-envision the church. But before we do any of that, I'm going to pause and ask you to reflect and think for a moment. In the classroom, we call this a think-pair-share activity. I'm not going to make you pair or share, but I will ask you to think. If you have a pen or a pencil and you want to jot down some notes, that would be great. Here's what I want you to think about. What is a body? How would you define that? What is a body like? What does a body do? What is a body? Whatever first comes to your mind, I want you to hold on to this as we move into our first section on cultural anthropology. In the mid-20th century, the British cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas studied various social groups around the world to try to understand why some communities have rich and complex ritual traditions involving the body and others don't. She studied not only distant, primitive societies like various tribes in Africa, but also Irish enclaves in contemporary London. What she found is that across cultures, the body is a symbol of the social world. The degree to which a society engages in bodily ritual practices like ritual washings or ritual meals is correlated with and is even determined by social structure. Douglas also found that different societies describe and value the body differently based on how that society is organized. In other words, social structure predicts body symbolism. The human body is described, perceived, and used in ritual in ways that reflect and reinforce a particular social structure. Now to explain this in a bit more detail, I will focus on Douglas's findings regarding two types of societies, hierarchical societies and individualist societies. These are not the only two types of societies that exist or that she identifies, but I'm focusing on these two just to illustrate her point. A hierarchical society is characterized by strong external boundaries and strong internal organization. It has a strong clear sense of group identity and its distinctiveness as a community in contrast to other societies or cultures. So it has a clear sense of kind of where it begins and ends, who's in and out. Within a hierarchical society, there's a fixed role structure. Each individual has a particular role to play and members have a clear sense of how they relate to one another. In some societies, this may take the form of a caste system based on race or gender or purity. From early on, you know who you are, you know what is expected of you, the deference you owe to authority figures, and the suspicion you want to have towards outsiders. I think a good example of this in our day is the British monarchy, especially if you've watched The Crown on Netflix, especially season three, where you see the tension between the young Prince Charles trying to find his own identity and have his own voice, and the Queen saying, you are not to have a person in identity, you are the Crown, the less that you are you, the more you serve the Crown and the monarchy. The opposite of this is an individualist society. Here, there's a much weaker sense of belonging to a cohesive group. In fact, groups or social institutions may be seen as a threat to the individual's identity or freedom. Individual authenticity and personal success is of much greater value here than group loyalty. Within this society, there is much weaker internal organization. There is no clear or fixed pattern for how individuals relate to one another and social roles may change over time or may just be undefined. The individual is encouraged to set out on her own, to find herself, chart her own path in life, climb the social ladder. And here, I think a good example in our day is working for the company Facebook or Meta. Their offices have this open floor plan. You don't have your own cubicle. The CEO sits in the middle so that he can be accessible to everyone's ideas. People move in and out of the company all the time based on better pay, better offers elsewhere. In one ad for working for Meta that I saw on LinkedIn, I will never work for Meta. But an employee says it is a place, quote, where your seniority or your title or your position shouldn't ever hold you back. That's an individualist society. Now, here's what is most interesting for Catholic theology and for our question of women, gender and the church. Douglas's research shows that the human body is described differently and is even experienced by people differently in these two societies because the body reflects the social order. In hierarchical societies with this strong group identity and clear articulation of social roles, the human body is seen as a particularly resonant symbol of the social order. The body is envisioned as a source of life and identity and as having clear boundaries that must be protected, just like the social group. The body also symbolizes solidarity. It's made up of many different parts that work together for the life of the whole. The members of the and the organs of the body are governed by and subordinate to ahead. This reflects the clear social organization and role differentiation within the society. Hierarchical societies also place high value on communal and bodily rituals, such as rights of initiation or healing, purification practices or offering of gifts or sacrifices to deities. Just think of the funeral procession for Queen Elizabeth. Her body was processed around the country in a highly orchestrated manner, while millions of others queued up to kneel or bow, which are bodily gestures before her body. In contrast, in more individualist societies where people feel uncommitted to any social group, there is less use of body symbolism to express social concerns or values. In fact, Douglas says that the body may come to represent an alien husk, something that the inmost self needs to escape, something whose exigencies should not be taken too seriously. There is an ambiguity toward the body in these societies that is reflective of more flexible social organization, looser social ties, and weaker group identity. That is, an ambiguity toward society and social institutions. Spiritual practices in these societies are also more private and tend to emphasize personal transformation and authenticity. Downloading a mindfulness meditation app makes more sense here than kneeling in a church pew or gathering around a Shabbat meal. This is also the world of remote work, now promoted at Metta. It doesn't matter where your body is. In both cases, the human body is a condensed symbol of the social order. The body is described in ways that reflect and reinforce the social world. Douglas's research shows that this holds true for many different cultural and social groups across the world. There is simply no neutral or ahistorical representation of the body. Think back to how you answered my opening question for your reflection. The way you defined the body is quite likely a result both of your own bodily particularities and the social organizations in which you live. Now, let me point out what you may already suspect. The Catholic Church has for a very, very long time been paradigmatic of a hierarchical society as Douglas describes it. In fact, Douglas herself was a devoted Catholic and she saw the Catholic Church as a hierarchy par excellence and she meant that as a good thing. The Catholic Church has clear markers of group belonging, baptism, confirmation, Eucharist. And for much, although not all, of its history there have been clearly defined roles within the church, clergy, lady, with clear lines of authority and obedience. If Douglas is right then, we should expect that the Catholic Church will envision the human body in ways that reflect and reinforce this hierarchical social form. This brings me to part two. When we look back at church history, we see that Douglas's insights do hold true for the church. The church is often described as a body or as the body of Christ, but this has meant very different things at different points in history. Because the meaning of the body changes in relation to social structure. I want to highlight five key moments in Catholic history to show how theologians and popes have described the human body and how this reflects and reinforces ecclesial structures or ecclesial concerns. The term ecclesial meaning an adjective for churchy. Moment one, the New Testament. In Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, we read that this young church was caught up in conflict, arguing about the relative superiority of certain charisms. In response, Paul needed to promote harmony within the community and to teach that each person's gifts and charisms are needed for the good of the whole. For Paul, the body was an apt symbol for this. The eyes, the feet, the head, and so on each has its own function in the body, all of them important, and they all work together for the sake of the whole body. And so Paul's first letter to the Corinthians states that quote, just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members though many are one body, so it is with Christ. In short, in first Corinthians, the body functions as a symbol of unity and interdependence of different but equal members. In order to reflect and reinforce unity and cooperation within the nascent Christian community. Moment two, the Middle Ages. The Gregorian reforms in the 11th century brought about significant growth in ecclesiastical structures, especially in the power and privileges of the papacy. The church was also gaining in political power at this time, and so conflicts were emerging between popes and kings regarding who had authority over Catholics. In this context, Pope Boniface VIII in 1308 used the metaphor of the body to argue that the pope alone and not the king has supreme authority over the church. Why? Because in his words, quote, there is one body of the one and only church and one head, not two heads, as if the church were a monster. And this head is Christ and his vicar Peter and his successor, end quote. A body doesn't have two heads, and so neither can the king as a second head have any power over the church. The metaphor of the body was also invoked in debates about power within the church. In the 15th century, theologians were trying to sort out who had ultimate authority in the church, a council or a pope. The conciliarists argued that the final authority in the church resides in the whole body of its members, by which they meant bishops and cardinals, not also lay people. We still didn't count at that point. The head of the body was seen as a member among members. The winning side, however, argued the opposite. The unity of a body can only be secured by rigorous subordination of all the members to a single head. A council, therefore, is subordinate to the pope, the head of the church. In both of these examples, the symbolic import of the human body was that it has a single, supremely important head, which all other members in the body must obey. This vision reflected and reinforced the growing power and influence of the papacy. Moment three, the Reformation. In the 16th century, Martin Luther critiqued the accretions of ritual and tradition and power that had accumulated on the church over the years. He taught that the true church was the quote, invisible church, a spiritual reality governed by Christ, not the ecclesiastical reality governed by the pope. To counter this, Catholic theologians in the Council of Trent insisted that the church is a necessarily visible institution. Once again, the image of the body was invoked to refute Luther's claims. After all, human bodies are visible material realities. You're not floating souls sitting in front of me, though maybe the Zoom people are, I guess. The church, too, is a living body. It is, therefore, a visible reality and is governed by a visible head, the pope. In order to be a member of this visible body, you must be united and subordinate to the visible head. Greed-only Catholics, not Protestants, are members of the body of Christ. In the centuries following the Reformation, the church was increasingly seen as a fortress in this way, a strong and steady bulwark against the errors of Protestantism and modernism and liberalism. And the symbol of the body, with its visible external form and clear borders, was used to justify and express this fortress mentality. Moment four, the 19th and early 20th centuries. Following the first Vatican Council in 1869 to 1870, Pope Leo XIII used the metaphor of the church as a body to defend papal primacy, saying that the supreme head governs a, quote, undivided and indivisible body. Members who are separated from the one head must, and I quote, of necessity die, end quote. He also described the papal teaching office through body language. In his words, precisely because it is a body is the church visible. Therefore, the teaching and governing of the church, quote, must also be visible, audible and perceptible to the senses, end quote. He actually uses the language of food here. He says that the head of the church feeds truth to the body, which is, quote, nourished by the food of heavenly doctrine. So in a development from what we see in the Middle Ages here, the head no longer just governs an obedient body, it feeds it. It's the very source of its life and spirit. A few decades later in 1943, Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical on the church as the mystical body of Christ. And in this encyclical, all of these prior elements come together. He explains at length that a body is an unbroken unity, visible and perceptible to the senses, whose members and organs are united under a visible head. And a body provides for its own life and health and growth. And so the church, the body of Christ, is the same. A single unbroken unity, whose members are nourished by the sacraments, united under the Roman pontiff, which is the visible head, and governed by him for the good of the whole. Between Vatican I and Vatican II, the image of the body as this visible, self-sustaining, clearly bounded organism governed by a head, reflected and reinforced, and often anti-Protestant and excessively institutional view of the church. This vision of the human body and ecclesial body only begins to change at Vatican II, which is our fifth and final moment. As the council began thinking anew about the church, it had to use the metaphor of the body in different ways, or sometimes just abandon it altogether. Rather than doubling down on papal powers, the council spoke about the whole people of God, the centrality of baptism, the universal call to holiness. And so when it used body language, it had to describe the body differently. For instance, the pope is no longer seen as a head raining over and giving life to lower members, but as a member among members, part of a larger whole. Likewise, the prior emphasis on the body's visibility was balanced by the council's description of the church as a sacrament, which is a unity of the visible and invisible. But overall, the council used the language of the body much less. What we see in this brief history here are two interrelated points. First, the description of a body perfectly tracks with the description of the church. You can see the parallels across. Those who viewed the church as a monarchy, with the pope at top and everyone else below him, described the human body as a monarchy too, as defined by its head, which provides life for and governs its lower subservient members. Likewise, the fortress mentality of the past centuries, in which the church had to guard itself against the encroachment of the secular world and the errors of Protestantism and so on, saw the body as a kind of fortress too, as having strong, visible borders that kept members and organs in and intruders and heretics out. Second, the way that popes and theologians and councils describe the human body changes. And takes on particular nuances of particular valence in relation to changing church structures. And you can see here too, down the third column, the description of the body changes over time. This is exactly as Mary Douglas predicts. There is no single static understanding of what a body is. Rather, the understanding of the body changes in relation to particular ecclesiological concerns. Saint Paul was facing the problem of competition and division within the church, so he sees the body as symbolizing unity. Medievals are justifying papal power and privilege, so for them the most important characteristic of a body is its head. When arguing against Protestants, emphasis is placed on the body's visibility and so on. It's a mutually reinforcing system here. The way we think about the church is expressed in bodily symbols and reigning views about the body impact how we think about the church. But now on to part three. What does any of this have to do with the church we live in today? Or our own bodies? Or with women in the church, the theme of this annual lecture series, or gender more broadly? I wager two things. First of all, bodies are much more interesting and complex than ecclesiology has often envisioned. And a more realistic account of bodies can actually help us imagine a better way of being church. Second, this history and theory helps explain the Magisterium's deep resistance to changing understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. Allow me to take these up in turn. To my first point, think back once again to how you defined a body or described your own body. I suspect you did not immediately say the most important characteristic of my body is that my arms and toes and guts are all obedient to my head. Nor did you probably say my body is a fortress, nothing gets in or out without my permission. I would venture to guess that you probably thought something more like, my body hurts, or I like my body. It's what lets me go for a walk on Jennings Beach at sunset or embrace my spouse or birth and nurture my children. Or maybe, gosh, my body doesn't work quite as well as it used to. My knees hurt. I get migraines. I have cancer. Or maybe simply, I don't know. I don't know what a body is. It's a bit of a mystery to me. When we think about what bodies are from the perspective of diverse, lived experiences, we recognize that bodies are much more complex than popes and theologians have admitted in the past. Bodies are leaky. They are not fortresses. They do not actually have clear and fixed borders. Our bodies let things in and out all the time. We eat and drink. We menstruate and defecate. We inhale viruses. We sweat out moisture from the pores of our skin. We are pretty obviously not fully independent from one another either. In pregnancy, there is literally no clear sense of where one body ends and another body begins. This is even the case for non-pregnant bodies. Each of us has roughly 39 trillion microbes, other bodies, living in and on us in a symbiotic relationship with our own bodies. Which frankly gives me the heebie-jeebies, but it is the truth. Our heads are also not unilaterally in charge of things either, are they? If that were the case, if all of our body parts worked together in harmony for the good of the whole under the direction of a head, then we would not experience heart attacks. Or get restless leg syndrome when trying to sleep at night. We wouldn't bump into tables or trip upstairs. If we thought about what the ecclesial body is like, based on actual experiences of being bodies, especially from the perspective of women's bodies and disabled bodies and very young and old bodies, we might come up with a much different vision of a church than what we've seen in the past millennium. As just one example, let's examine the role of a head in a body. As you've heard, theologians have often described the church as being defined by dependent on and united under a single head. However, contemporary research in philosophy and neuroscience and cognitive theory offers a different vision of how bodies function as a unified whole. As it happens, we don't actually move throughout the world dependent on cognitive conscious processing. Much of our ability to go about our days and perform necessary actions is not a result of consciously kind of finding our limbs and designating certain tasks to them. Rather, we just know where our bodies are because we are constantly living as bodies in the world. If I'm standing at this podium and start to lose my balance, my leg will kind of jut out to the side. My hand will reach out for a stable object to try and hold me upright without my having to think about it. Many of us can probably also type at a keyboard with our eyes closed because our fingers just know the distance between the keys and where they are. I remember having to practice this in middle school. It was one of the assignments in computer class was to kind of type a sentence with your eyes closed. We don't always need visual input into our heads in order to act in the world. We don't always need our head to constantly and consciously govern and order our limbs in order to accomplish a task. We generally function quite well simply out of embodied habit. Philosophers point out that this is what constitutes bodily unity. Our bodies function as holes when and because we have a task to do or a mission to accomplish. But conscious reflection can actually help us too. We do bump into door frames and trip up stairs after all and we can develop poor bodily habits. If you regularly lift your head up in a golf swing, that becomes a bodily habit too to the detriment of your long game. Having a coach watch your swing or watching a video recording of your tee off can help you become aware of poor bodily habits in areas in need of improvement. In other words, reflective conscious awareness of our bodies can help us live and move better. Through conscious cognitive attention to our bodies we can become better golfers, develop better posture, run further distances with less pain, and generally do what we want to do a little bit better. This is often what yoga or mindfulness meditation or physical therapy tries to help us attain. So what if this description of a body were a symbol of the social? How might we think about the church then? This description of the body offers a new vision of the dynamics of teaching and governing in the church. The body has knowledge and capacities of its own that are not dependent on direction from the head. In theological terms this is exactly what the sense is fidelium, the sense of the faithful is about. All members of the body of Christ have wisdom and truth to contribute to the church. The head does not simply tell the limbs what to do or how to act. The body, the whole people of God, has its own knowledge due to the fact that it is intimately familiar with the world. If we thought about the body in this way, we might also see that the unity of the church is less a result of governance from the Pope, the head, and more about engaging the whole people of God in mission. The unity of the church as a body comes about when all of its members live the life of Christ, proclaim the reign of God, feed the hungry, and clothe the poor. But still, neither the body nor the head has flawless judgment. Conscious reflection can improve our bodily actions. For the church, this suggests that all members of the faithful must be in dialogue with bishops and vice versa, working together in a mutually informing and self-correcting process. More regular and robust structures of dialogue within the church are necessary for the church's own self-knowledge for effective missionary work and for expressing and handing on the faith. In a word, the description of the body that I just gave reinforces a vision of a truly synodal church, in which all members of the body of Christ speak and listen to each other's wisdom. Now to my second and final point. Douglas' insight into the relationship between the body and societies can help us understand what exactly is at stake in contemporary debates about gender. I have been showing two things. First, the way we think about, describe, and experience our bodies reflects and reinforces particular social structures. And second, that changes in ecclesial structures bring about changes in body symbolism. If this is indeed true, then changes in the way we think about biological sex, gender, and sexuality will instigate changes in church structures and vice versa. I believe we are in the midst of these changes right now. As you probably know, the Catholic Magisterium teaches that biological sex exists in only one of two forms, male or female. These are binary realities that are given at birth and are unchanging. One sex as either male or female determines and is synonymous with one's gender identity as man or woman, and structures one's whole psychological and spiritual constitution. It's not just about bodies, but about our whole person. Moreover, male and female are complementary realities. Man and woman are created for each other, find fulfillment in each other, especially in heterosexual marriage. These theological views have been developed most thoroughly by Pope John Paul II and what is now known as his theology of the body. His work has dominated Magisterial theology and papal documents, as well as seminary education, parish formation programs, and marriage prep over the past few decades, and is typically seen as the Catholic view of sex and gender. It's clear to most of us, though, that these theological positions are being contested both in society and in our culture and within the church, as you can see from some headlines here. As one example, it's becoming a norm at my university, which is Catholic and Jesuit, that when you introduce yourself in a classroom or in your email signature or in a name tag at a conference that you state your pronouns. Hi, I'm Elise. My pronouns are she, her. This is a public signal that you recognize that one's visible appearance does not necessarily determine one's gender identity, and it opens up space for trans, queer, and non-binary persons to state their pronouns, which might be they, them, as a kind of rejection of the binary options of male or female altogether. In the world of Catholic theology, many theologians are engaging deeply with the scientific research on sexual and gender diversity and are offering much more nuanced theological understandings of sex and gender than what we typically hear from the Magisterium. For example, rather than thinking about sex or gender identity as given at birth based on external anatomy, some Catholic theologians suggest that we see gender identity as cultivated. Maybe there is something about our gender identity that is innate or given, but each of us is also responsible for developing our gender identity and relating to other gendered people in healthy and balanced ways. The Vatican and U.S. bishops have been critical of this openness to more fluid accounts of gender, which they see as a radical rejection of family, of creation of the body, and a nearly heretical embrace of individual subjectivity and choice. In 2019, and this is the correct headline you see here, the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education issued a document explicitly condemning what it calls, quote, gender ideology and calling on Catholic schools, churches, and educators to maintain a, quote, a Catholic vision of human sexuality, end quote. At least 30 dioceses in the U.S. have taken up that call and have issued statements or policies against trans inclusion in parishes and schools. In the Archdiocese of Hartford, for example, schools, quote, shall accept and relate to students and all members of the school community according to their God-given biological sex as male or female, consistent with the complementary nature of each, end quote. Our other neighbor here, the Archdiocese of New York, their policy is very similar. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for example, individuals who, quote, live a transgender lifestyle may not receive communion or be confirmed. These debates extend beyond the church, of course, and we've seen Texas introduce a bill criminalizing gender-affirming medical care for trans youth as child abuse, and Florida and its bill prohibiting education in public schools about diverse sex and gender identities. Regardless of one's own position on these issues, it is clear that both society and church are becoming increasingly divided on matters of bodies, sex and gender. What I simply want to point out here is that if it is true that the body is a symbol of the social, then these theological debates about gender are also implicitly debates about the church. For one, the male-female binary exactly mirrors and reinforces the clergy lady binary, the Christ church binary, the church world binary. And in fact, most of those relationships are expressed in gendered ways. Christ, the bridegroom, is united to the church His bride. The male-only clergy represents this bridegroom before a feminized lady. To reject the male-female binary at a biological level, then, is to undermine all of these other gendered binaries in the church. But beyond these simple gender parallels, recall Douglas's descriptions of hierarchical and individualist societies, and how they each describe the body. In hierarchical societies, the body is a deeply resonant symbol. The body is the source of life. It has clear boundaries. Each member or organ has a fixed role to play. The body is meaningful in a hierarchical society. It is deeply involved in communal ritual practices. In individualist societies, however, the body is a more ambiguous reality. It may be seen as an alien husk, something from which the inmost self needs to escape. In individualist societies, one can pursue a spiritual life apart from bodily practices and communal rituals and traditions. I think the Magisterium is intuiting that a more flexible and individualized way of experiencing sex and gender evokes a more flexible, less hierarchical, more individualist way of being church. And I think the Magisterium fears that if bodily anatomy does not determine one's gender, if there are more options for humanity than simply man or woman or male or female, in other words, if tradition and external structures are not the primary locus of one's life and identity, then the church, a tradition and community with rules and roles and bodily rituals and the Eucharist, the body of Christ, will become less and less relevant to. Or, at the very least, a new way of being church will emerge. One that is less dependent on hierarchy, one where your sexual anatomy does not determine your status as clergy or lady, one where the Eucharist is not simply a physical object to be worshiped but a dynamic reality to be lived. Now, I don't think that this is something we ought to fear. I think this vision of a more flexible, less hierarchical church is actually a good thing. I also think a church and society that is more welcoming of trans, queer, and non-binary persons is a good thing. Perhaps you agree. And so, I would like to end on a note of hope for the church and for queer Catholics. Although Francis is just as outwardly suspicious of gender ideology as his predecessors, he has also reformed the ecclesial social order in a number of ways that slightly loosen the hierarchical structures of the past that we've heard about. And I'll name just a few examples here. The synodal process is an attempt, even if imperfect, at integrating many more people into the process of teaching and learning. The Pope, the head, is not the only teacher. Francis has also created new instituted ministries of Catechist and formally opened the ministries of Lecter and Acolyte to women. This chips away a bit at the strict clergy lady binary and the static division of roles and responsibilities in the church. The new reform of the Curia this past spring does the same, allowing laypeople to hold positions of governance formally restricted just to the ordained. Francis is also less interested in the in-group, out-group markers of a hierarchical society, and instead he seeks a culture of encounter, a commitment to inter-religious dialogue and even the inclusion of non-Christians in liturgical rituals. All of these are changes to the typical hierarchical society with its rigid external borders and fixed internal role structure. If it is true, as Douglas suggests, that bodily symbolism depends on and correlates with social form, then we can hope and perhaps even expect that as these new ways of being church take hold, our ways of understanding the body will shift too. The church has always been in a process of change and development, and it has always reflected on the meaning of the body as it seeks to understand and articulate its own life and structures and mission in the world. But we need not be limited to expressions of the past because we have never thought about bodies apart from historical, cultural and social contexts. As we move into time for questions and discussions and challenges, those are also welcome. I would invite you to think back one more time to your initial question for reflection. What can your experience of embodiment teach the church? Thank you for your attention this evening, and I look forward to our discussion together. Thank you, Ali. You have given us a lot to talk about. Before we turn to questions, I should pass along a compliment to you from someone I think you know. So, Kristen Hire at Boston College said, excellent lecture, engaging, substantive, substantive and relevant. Thank you. So, this is really the moment for comments and questions from the group online and the group here in the room. So, let's start here, and I'll let me invite anyone here to raise a question or make a comment. I think Nancy at the back there, go ahead. You can speak from there, but I'll bring the microphone because that's much better for the people online. It's really so nice to have you here and just a really thoughtful lecture. There's so much that we can talk about with this. You know, I was struck by when you were describing the church's body at the beginning in a hierarchical society. How much, you know, the ideal is sort of the ideal male body, distinct, borders. You know, it's a Roman soldier is the ideal. That is what we're protecting. That's the bulwark, right? And, you know, we've talked in my gender class, and I'm sure you know from your gender things, that part of the issues in the early, in the cultures around the early church, were that, you know, being penetrated is a female thing, or it's a feminizing thing, right? Those borders are inviolable. And then when you talk today about how Pope Francis, you know, and you've said that the social, that's a social writ large there, right? You know, yes, Pope Francis, you know, his comments on gender ideology, I think, you know, can use quite a bit of nuance in there. They reflect his own upbringing, perhaps. But when you talk about how he is opening the church and reaching across borders in some ways, I wonder if at some point were he to live for a hundred years, that social norm would cataclyze the church itself and its understanding of bodies and then open some doors. Yeah, I think you're right. I think over time it will, and I think it's almost a gap in Francis' own thought to kind of not see that yet, because he is so attentive to the local level of the church, to people's experiences of the church, of the spirit of God kind of at the ground level, and he wants that to be the primary locus of the church. That is what the church is. It's not the Pope tucked away off in Rome. So I think he's trying to reorient the center of gravity in the life of the church as a whole. But I think if he could think about anthropology, about the human person, about sex and gender that way, I think we would talk about sex and gender differently too, because that would force us to think about, to listen to you, to take seriously the voices of people who are saying, hey, I don't feel like I fit these boxes of male or female or man or woman in quite the same way. So I think he's instituting a process of listening in the church that I think could and should be applied to kind of each and every person individually to kind of listen to their own embodied experience to discern that and figure out how to live that well. And I think his other, he's always attentive to who is marginalized in the church. He wants the church to go out to the marginalized to hear their voices. In much of the world, it's LGBTQ persons who are marginalized in a particular way. So I think even there, if we were to apply his own sort of method of who do we listen to in the church, who do we want to hear from? It would be the voices of LGBTQ Catholics. The people online are sending you more compliments. So Ursula Halligan says, brilliant lecture, substantial, thoughtful, brave, thank you. But there is also a question here from online. So here's the question from an anonymous attendee. How is gender different from sex and doesn't identifying as the opposite gender reinforce the norm of gender identity? That is that men feel and present themselves one way and vice versa for women. That's a good and difficult question. A typical way of answering the question of what's the difference between sex and gender is to think that sex is the biological and gender is the social. That sex is am I male or female? What's my anatomy? What are my chromosomes? And gender is the kind of how do I live that socially? Whether it's how do I behave? How do I dress? What pronouns do I use? Maybe who do I look for as role models? Though other people that work in the area of gender studies say that actually even biological sex is gendered. One easy example of this is intersex infants who are born with perhaps ambiguous genitalia or a combination of internal female anatomy, external female genitalia. That is treated as a medical crisis and a medical team says we must resolve this conflict to make this person, this newborn infant into strictly more clearly either a male or a female. So there are ways in which our social understandings of what people should be actually influence things at the biological level. So you can think about it as biological, social, but it's actually not that simple. But to the question of doesn't the concept of trans identity of I was born this way but I feel like the other gender doesn't that just reinforce this binary. I think different trans people articulate their experiences in different ways. For some people it is articulated as a kind of internal felt sense of I feel like I am this other social category or I identify with a different social category. Other people simply reject that binary altogether saying I don't think I fit any of these and I don't want to claim the terms male or female, man or woman. So it's not always an option for the other but I think all of these experiences simply indicate that the binary that we assume and that is taught to us in many ways does not actually cash out in practice all the time. Do we have a question from the crowd here? That was extremely interesting. Thank you. I loved it. And I was struck by when you were speaking about the individualist societies and how they view the body versus the hierarchical societies and how they view the body. And then through your lecture you were talking about society is having a more individualist understanding of the body. And that's in turn going to influence the church. I'm wondering if you've done any thinking about what beyond synodality those structures might look like, whether or not you're prescribing them. But what might those structures look like within the nuts and bolts, the hierarchy for lack of a better word of the church if it's absorbing this individualized role, individualized idea of the body. Can I ask you to clarify, do you mean what would those individualized forms of church look like or less hierarchical? What might the institution, how might the institution change? Or is that for a later lecture or book? Give me a couple of years on the book by the way. I don't know. What I see now is just real resistance to the change in the U.S. church especially. I think the practice of synodality was unevenly applied in the U.S. church. It went over better in some dioceses than others. I take heart in the fact that we are not the beacon for the church globally, that we are not the center actually of the Catholic church writ large. I think synodality is going better in other parts of the world, for example the German church, the German bishops. But I see the resistance to these changing social forms in the United States, especially if you look at the Eucharistic Revival, which is currently underway that the U.S. bishops launched in June. This came out of like the Biden debacle last summer among the U.S. bishops meeting over the summer saying are we going to publicly deny Biden communion? We have this Catholic president who supports abortion. What do we do? Instead of condemning or prohibiting Biden from receiving communion, they said we are going to launch a Eucharistic Revival. It is a three-year process. It culminates in June 2024. It will be this whole program of Eucharistic preaching, trying to get people back in the pews to recognize the real presence. It was also inspired by that Pew forum poll of a couple years ago that suggested that only 30% of Catholics believe in the real presence, which made a lot of headlines. So I think the U.S. bishops are perceiving this apparent lack in belief in the real presence and they are launching this Eucharistic Revival to get people back into a particular place to worship the Eucharist as this kind of physical form. And I think all of these Eucharistic practices, these are practices of a hierarchical structure. I think the decline in mass attendance, maybe changing beliefs about the Eucharist are reflective of more individualist societies. So I think the Eucharistic Revival is in some ways an unconscious response to these changing social forms. I don't think it will work. I think we need to think about new ways to engage in Eucharistic liturgies that make more sense to an individualist society, because I don't think that is changing. I think especially as the world of work from home continues to be the norm, especially if like Metta actually does take over the world and we live in this quasi virtual reality of augmented reality. We don't know what a body is and isn't and you can be here but not in a bodied way. I think the church will just have to adapt to rethinking how do we worship the Eucharist a body in that way, while also still inviting people to be bodies in particular places. So I think the church needs to hold on to that, but I don't think society is going to change. I have another question from the online. I have two questions here actually, but one at a time. So first, how does the church's historical suspicion and distrust of the body, especially the female body, affect our notions of church? Well, bizarrely enough, it tends to prefer to think about the church as a female body. The language of church as woman and mother has deep roots in the tradition and a theologian out of Australia by the name of Christina Yadogomez has a book on the church as woman and mother in the early church fathers and to some extent in the early Middle Ages. But for all of its suspicion of the female body occasionally perhaps fear or despisal of the female body in terms of actual historical female persons, the church has been spoken of as a female body, a mother that that gives birth to Christians, gives birth to its children, nurtures Christians. So I think what we see is at the same time a suspicion of actual women and a kind of that gets channeled and rerouted in interesting ways to a worship of a symbolic woman. So we have two or three more questions here, but is there another one from the group? Yeah, from the group present here. Thank you for this lecture. So I'm in Dr. Delabelli's class and one of the things we talk about is how God is viewed. So my question was, do you think how the church is structured as like a hierarchical society influences the way that we talk about God, especially when it comes to gender? Thank you. I was once in Dr. Delabelli's, I'm in a Styalogies class too, many moons ago, so watch out what might happen if you continue. You might end up up here someday. I think it does and I think the images of God kind of go hand in hand with some of these church structures we've been talking about. I mean if you think about the church as a monarchy, I mean God is king as well as the Pope. So I think the male or masculinized images of God kind of fit right in with this hierarchical understanding, especially when the church is modeled on a monarchy, on a feudal structure. The images of God as Lord and King and Master obviously support all of that too, and especially as Dr. Delabelli mentioned, this image of the body is a masculine body. The Roman soldier is a great way to put it, kind of covered in armor, impregnable. And I think that is typically how some sort of classical theology, especially from the Enlightenment on, has thought about God that way too. God is impassable, immutable, far out in the distance, cannot impact us, or we cannot impact God, God simply lords over us. So I think you're right, those go hand in hand. So a couple more questions and then we'll start, but one from online and one more from here maybe. So online I got this question, wondering whether you can speculate on if and or when we as the people of God might move beyond the theology of the body. Capital T, capital B. Not a moment too soon. I don't know the if or the when, but maybe I could speculate on the how. I think the how might come about through increased delay education in theology both in undergraduate levels and in graduate levels and seminary formation to some degree for priests. I think as if you can teach pastors and lay ministers and deacons and priests something other than John J.P. Too's theology of the body. If you can have them be taught by women theologians in a seminary program or in a divinity school, if you can have them reading female theologians and feminist theologians. I think it will seep in that that way because right now really the only option. I mean I think marriage prep from everything I've heard from my married friends is basically J.P. Too through and through. And I think that won't change until we have pastors that have a different kind of imagination. Thank you. I was wondering if you had any suggestions for Catholic schools on how they might be able to care for trained students. You don't have to answer the question. I wish I did. I wish I did. I am grateful that I don't work in a Catholic middle school or high school because I think that would be a really difficult place to do this kind of theological work and ministry. I would refer you to people that do do this work well though. I just saw last week NCR did an article on these issues of policies being implemented in Catholic schools against trans inclusion. And there was a link there to a Google drive that has been collated by a man who teaches at Zivarian Brothers High School in Worcester. Not within, yes, outside Boston. And he put together this document because he was finding that he was having students who were gay or queer or trans come to his office, really an absolute crisis. And he didn't know how to handle that, didn't know what the protocol was, what are the policies. And so he's put together a whole database of here's everything that the bishops are saying so that teachers and educators and people who make policy or want to change the system are at least aware of what they're working against. So I think people that work in those contexts really need to strategize about how they're going to do that because right now official Catholic teaching does not have much life giving to offer to these communities. This is where, I mean maybe the other way to go. So this example of the Nativity School of Worcester, you may remember these headlines from the summer. They had a pride flag and a Black Lives Matter flag up in June and their Catholic identity, Jesuit identity was revoked because they refused to take down those flags. So I think, I mean that's just another option of kind of stand outside the system altogether. There are pros and cons of that but I hope any Catholic educators at different levels out there in high schools or middle schools can find one another and find ways to minister to these communities in ways that are life giving. So Phyllis Saganus has a great job. Thanks Phyllis. And she's not easy to please. So sorry Phyllis, she's probably still there. One last question. I'm sorry we've taken, we have lots of questions here, I just didn't have time to get to but one last question here is, so when this conversation is taking place along the lines that you're suggesting, it's usually we're talking about sex, sexuality and gender as a ways to approach this. Is there anything additional or different coming from those who study disability? It's not the same and yet it is the same. Yeah, I think there is a world of disability studies and disability theology that I've only dabbled in a little bit. It's another area of research that is really attending to like what our bodies as they are actually lived, how can we rethink the church from the perspective of disabled bodies, how can we rethink God from the perspective of disabled bodies. I think the difference in the analogy though is that I don't see these kind of headlines about disabled folks, whether those are physical or cognitive disabilities. I don't think that the church is not resisting those expressions of embodiment in the way that they are trans or queer embodiment. I think the reason why gender and sexuality is such a sticking point is first of all because the gendered binaries function as metaphors for the church, Christ and the church for salvation. We are saved through the relationship between Christ married to his church. So I think there is commonality in the ways that disability theologians and disabled theologians are rethinking and renewing how we think about bodies and their complexity. But I think the difference is that there is not quite the pushback and resistance. Thank you. So before we offer a lot of thanks, something is coming from the O'Callaghan's. This is one of the Joe O'Callaghan's. Hello. I'm Joe O'Callaghan Jr. and my father had some things he wanted to say tonight but unfortunately he fell down today. So I got the job. So if you'll just bear with me for a minute. So first, Elise, we want to thank you for your wonderful talk and for coming and being here and we've really appreciated that and all your help with this lecture over the years as well. And so here's my dad's words. Twenty-two years ago when we first approached Father Aloysius Kelly, then the president of Fairfield University, about establishing the Andromio-Callaghan lecture on women in the church, we met Paul Lakeland. As you know, Paul is a most gracious person who has played a number of significant roles here at Fairfield. He's an admirable scholar whose book, The Liberation of the Laity, encouraged lay people to make their voices heard in the church. By all accounts, he is also an excellent teacher who has inspired many students among them, our speaker this evening. Fairfield honored him many years ago by appointing him the Aloysius P. Kelly Chair of Catholic Studies and the director of the Center of Catholic Studies. Every year from the inception of this lecture series, Paul has introduced us to an extraordinary array of women theologians who are bringing an entirely new perception to our understanding of the church. Among them was our very first speaker, Elizabeth Johnson, with whom Anne, who had studied at Fordham University. The purpose of our lecture is to provide a venue where the voices of women theologians can and should be heard. We believe that this lecture series advances Anne's expressed hope many years ago in a letter to a friend. I can't quite give up the notion that the Roman Catholic Church may someday treat women believers in the same way Jesus did. It was also her wish that Catholic women would stand free and tall and claim their rightful place in the discipleship of Jesus, the discipleship of equals. We will know in our souls that it is right to claim equal partnership with men in participation and leadership in the church. Under Paul's direction and with the financial support of so many of you, we believe that Anne's expectations are being fulfilled. Recently we learned that this will be Paul's last year as director of Catholic Studies at Fairfield. That being so, our family wishes to express our sincere gratitude to him for his magisterial direction of this lecture series and his exceptional kindness to all of us. I am sure you will join us in commending his remarkable achievement and his many years of faithful service to the church that we love. Now, Paul, let me present you a gift, this gift as a sign of our gratitude and affection as you begin this new stage in your earthly pilgrimage. May God guide you in every step and as the Irish say, may the road rise to meet you. Thank you. So, I know that this is a hackneyed phrase, but this is an unexpected pleasure. I had no idea that this was going to happen. This is my final year at Fairfield. I'm not spending the year retiring. We've got lots to do before that time comes. I am grateful for this because this is my last O'Callaghan lecture. I have two things to do now. First, to continue the tradition we have of announcing who will be next year's lecturer. So, next year the O'Callaghan lecture will be offered by Megan Clark from St. John's University in New York. And you should expect a very good presentation. She's a terrific person and she has a lot of connections. Obviously, the most important thing I have to do is to say, while I am so grateful for this, this is not my evening, this is Elise's evening. So, let's applaud her again. Good. On the way out you can pick up a leaflet that tells you all about the many more wonderful things we're doing. Our next event, three weeks from now, Carolyn Forchet, a great American poet, will be here to talk about the poetry of dissent. See you then, I hope. Thank you.