Crazy? Angry? You decide and I couldn’t care less!

I Am the Jesuit Whisperer

A Catholic Case for Choosing Your Own Pronouns

VIEWS Jim McDermott, S.J. / April 21, 2023

I’m sure some of you didn’t know this, but I am a Jesuit Whisperer. I can translate all of the amazingly smart things that are so far above you so that maybe you can just grasp a little of their saintliness. There should be a degree in this but, alas, there is not so I will not be able to add letters to my name as these mighty social justice warriors! I’ll have to settle for making those my personal pronouns. I hope these translations help you to realize just how wrong the patriarchal, all-male hierarchy Church really is.

In recent months, a number of Catholic bishops in the US have spoken out against transgender and non-binary people’s decision to alter their pronouns, names and bodies. Some have even insisted that Catholic schools must continue to use the birth pronoun and names of transgender and non-binary students in their schools, despite the pain that non-binary and transgender people have expressed over this practice.

In recent months, a number of Catholic bishops in the US have spoken out against people suffering with gender dysphoria who would like to make us deny reality and affirm their delusions despite the wailing of people who have no interest in the Catholic Church except to sue it, demanding they ditch Catholicism. Some have insisted Catholic schools must remain Catholic. The nerve.

The arguments of these bishops and others have been built on Catholic moral teachings and interpretations of Scripture. And as I’ve read their statements, I’ve wondered whether there’s another theological case that can be made in favor of the decision by transgender and non-binary people to alter their pronouns and names.

The arguments of bishops and others are faithful to the teachings of the Church and the Bible. Op-ed dude wonders if there’s another argument that can save their anti-Catholic ship in regards to affirming their delusions.

So I reached out to three theologians: the moral ethicist Fr. James Keenan, S.J., at Boston College; Gina Hens-Piazza, Ph.D., a Scripture scholar at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif.; and Annie Selak, Ph.D., an ecclesiologist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

So he reached out to three people who agree with him and also hate the doctrines of the Church. What else is a “pop culture priest” do?

In each case, I asked them whether they thought a Catholic theological case could be made for the acceptance of a person’s stated pronouns and name from the standpoint of their own discipline.

In each case he asked whether or not liberals who are now using the minority of the minorities can  prove their “development of doctrine” canard.

Here’s what they had to say.

Here’s what they say repeatedly most days of the week. It’s totally solid Catholicism. Trust me.

The Moral Requirement of Accepting Agency: Fr. James Keenan, S.J.

“I don’t understand the problem,” Fr. Keenan tells me as we begin our conversation. “People may think I’m naïve, but it just strikes me that I don’t call somebody a name that they don’t want to be called.”

Fr Keenan understands the problem completely and takes the opportunity to feign naiveite. “Why would the Church ever act like it’s Catholic! I do declare!”

“I note the argument made by some that what is at issue is the truth of who those individuals are.”

Some have the nerve to say an orange is not an apple. A man is not a dog. My afternoon 5 finger scotch is not lemonade! How dare they question the lived reality!

“It’s their truth, though,” Keenan responds. “That’s what we’re talking about: their truth. How does a bishop have more capability of grasping other people’s truth than they themselves do? There’s something deeply disturbing about claiming you understand a person’s truth better than they do.”

It’s their truth, got it?! It doesn’t resemble truth as God ordained and as the bishops understand it, but it’s theirs, gosh darn it. There’s something deeply disturbing about Catholics being Catholic. I demand we stop it for the greater good.

I wonder what Keenan makes of the decision by some bishops to frame transgender persons’ desires as indicative of a mental health crisis rather than a legitimate desire. “These bishops, are they physicians?” Keenan asks. “If you take away a person’s way of declaring their self-understanding, where is there room for any dialogue? You’ve said, ‘I’m not going to talk to you on your terms.’ Who does that? Even in  mental health places, I don’t think they do that.” 

These bishops! Are they scientists? Do they really know the sky is blue? Do they really know a dog is not a cat?  How dare they look at the obvious and state it is obvious!  Isn’t there any room for dialogue???

In terms of Catholic ethics, Keenan looks to foundational concepts. “Catholic moral principles need to begin with a sense of respecting the dignity of a human person,” he explains. “In the horizon of meeting one another,” Keenan explains, “we have to allocate the agent their experiential self-understanding as privileged.” There can be no getting to the truth, he argues, “if you’re not going to attend to agency.”

Dignity of the human person! It doesn’t matter that they are being disrespectful of the body God gave them. It doesn’t matter they are rejecting it. We have to let them do it because it’s their lived experience, and lived experiences are always more important than reality for those with dysphoria. They think they’re fat? Well, they should have the agency to starve themselves. It’s their lived experience! Think they are missing limbs? My gosh! Why did we not cut them off earlier because, well, lived experience!

He notes that this is demonstrated in Scripture as well. How does God enter into relationship with Israel through Moses? By introducing himself. “The beginning of all discussion is getting the name right.”

This one is even beyond my feeble knowledge, even if I am an expert in Jesuit speak. Some things are just too brilliant for me to even try to grasp.

There’s another moral principle at work for Keenan, a virtue he’s alluded to already: humility. “To say you know better than they know themselves, it strikes me as almost a divine perspective. How could you have such a transcendental viewpoint?” Keenan compares this way of proceeding with that of his doctoral director Joseph Fuchs, SJ, who served on the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control first established by Pope John XXIII in 1963. Prior to his appointment, Keenan explains, “Fuchs always thought that he knew what the moral law was.” But listening to married people talk about their experiences revealed the deficits in his own analysis. It did so to such a profound degree, in fact, that Fuchs “revised his entire moral theology,” says Keenan. Fuchs decided “The question of competency for a moral judgment rests with those who are closest to the experience.”

I got shot down when the Church said birth control was compatible with God’s law, but I’m going to give it one more shot. And don’t you dare try to tell me murderers don’t have a “lived experience”. Since they are closest to the experience, they are completely competent to murder someone. They have that moral agency!

Keenan acknowledges that a person’s experience “has to be filtered through all sorts of other things. But knowing what is there requires the subject to be able to convey it.” If the church insists that a person’s fundamental self-understanding is in error, there’s no room for them to convey what they know. Refusing to allow people to self-identity, he says, sends the message “If you don’t meet me as I want you to meet me, then I won’t meet you.”

Of course, a person’s lived experience has to be filtered through what I hold dear and right. Just because you think you know what it is to be a Catholic doesn’t really mean you do. You need to meet me at the conclusions I’ve come to.

“All you’re doing is silencing them,” Keenan insists. “There can be no dialogue if there’s no respect.”

No dialogue! No respect! No bowing down to my abject whims! No respect! I’m a Jesuit, for goodness sakes! I know these things!

The Inmost Self: Gina Hans-Piazza, Ph.D.

In considering the question of self-identification, the Scripture scholar Gina Hans-Piazza begins with Psalm 139, 13-16:

 

“You formed my inmost being;

    you knit me in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, because I am wonderfully made;

  wonderful are your works!…

  Your eyes saw me unformed;

 

    In your book all are written down;

my days were shaped, before one came to be.”

God made them to be a woman trapped in a man’s body or vice versa! Just accept that. It has nothing to do with sin in the world or their own personal sins. That’s how God made them. I’m a scripture scholar and not crazy in the least.

The clear sense here, Hans-Piazza explains, is that “the self that has been created by God is more than the physical self. The inner self is being lifted up here. That “inmost self,” she says, is “what really defines a person” for the Psalmist, rather than any notion of physicality. “Psalm 139 celebrates the creation of the innermost self as the actual act of God.”

You’ve got to look at the inmost self. Don’t look at all the poppycock that the Ratzinger guy told you about the soul and the body mirroring each other.

In this context, claiming the identity that we discover within ourselves over time, rather than being a sin or error, is the way in which we are true to God. “The person can, by virtue of their in-touchness with themselves, praise God for being so wonderfully made.”

“Their in-touchness!” Look it up. It’s actually found in the Church Parents!

While the question of personal pronouns is not something that comes up in Scripture—“it is just so far outside the mindset of antiquity”—Hans-Piazza notes that any number of biblical characters do change their names. “Abram’s name is changed to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Jacob to Israel, Saul to Paul.” And she notes, these name changes always come back to that same feeling expressed by transgender persons of one’s inmost self: “All of these [changes] are in conjunction with identity changes, with their deep self-understanding.”

While nothing in scripture says anything about personal pronouns, we’re going to act like a bunch of bible characters chose their own names instead of God signifying His covenant and their new life in Him. They were all just trans-something. Again – their in-touchness!

Hans-Piazza also points out that in other respects religion is very open to these kinds of name changes. “For someone who becomes ordained, we start calling them Father; for someone who is married or divorced, we use the last name they want; or there’s religious profession.”

All sorts of religions do this and we call priests Father (not that it has anything to do with the fact they have made a vow or anything). It’s all the same as transgender people. The exact same. If you were in touch with your in-touchness you would do this too.

These sorts of contradictions make Hans-Piazza wonder whether the resistance to pronouns and name changes doesn’t reflect a deeper transphobia or homophobia, and a misunderstanding of scriptural references to homosexuality (which a number of Scripture scholars have commented on). “In my own life, I’ve always been called ‘Jenna.’ My baptismal name was Virginia, but I was always called ‘Jenna.’” She posits, if someone insisted on calling her ‘Virginia’ on some kind of religious ground, that would be widely understood as strange.”

I can’t see that it’s any different than a nickname. It’s really not. Just do it.

So why, she wonders, would it be appropriate for a Christian or Catholic to object over a choice of pronoun? “What’s really at the root?” she asks. “I am suspicious.”

I am suspicious that these faithful Catholic bishops don’t want people suffering from dysphoria to be affirmed in it. It’s like they want them to get help for their mental illness! What is our Church coming to???

Contending with the Wounds of the Church: Annie Selak, Ph.D.

A lot of the Georgetown ecclesiologist Annie Selak’s current work focuses on the wounds carried by the church. “My basic thesis is that the church can only credibly be church if it attends to its own wounds,” she says, listing racism, sexism, clericalism and the exclusion of the LGBTQ community as amongst them. “There are some in the church who say if we recognize the sin in the church, then we harm the holiness of the church,” she acknowledges. “My argument is the opposite. My argument is that the church can only live into its mission if it grapples with its own wounds.”

I’m a Georgetown professor. Enough said. Just obey and, by the way, priests should stop abusing every child they meet and the Church should make reparations for slavery.

In ignoring our wounds, Selak argues, we undermine our mission. She points to the treatment of LGBT+ people: “I look to the four marks of the church: unity, catholicity, oneness, holiness,” she explains. “How are we holy if we are telling people that they don’t belong? How are we one if we’re excluding members from the body of Christ, from the people of God, if we’re saying some people are in, some people are out? That hinders the one holy catholic, apostolic church.”

The Church is just telling people to go away. It’s not like they’re calling them to embrace Truth or anything. To be one, holy, catholic and apostolic, you need to embrace their sin, stupid Church.

“If we look at that most foundational understanding of church by those four marks, I think all of us are harmed when some people are included and others are excluded.” And we see the evidence of that harm within the body of the church, she notes. “I think a lot of people are leaving because they don’t want to be complicit in real harm and hatred. Then I know a lot of people, myself included, who stay because we say the way the church is being church isn’t actually it. We want to work to make the church look a little bit more like the reign of God.””

A lot of people are leaving because the Church is mean and I’ve told them that, so they are leaving because I am so much smarter than all those lame bishops who are men. Not letting me have more power is also super harmful to everyone I’ve ever met.

“I think that same love for the church motivates each way.”

“Practically speaking, confronting our wounds involves “truth telling,” Selak says. “I think sometimes the church is scared to confront its own woundedness, because what we know now is comfortable.”

Confronting our wounds involves truth telling, but only truth telling which I tell you is truth otherwise it’s untruth and really super mean.

I wonder if part of the threat posed by confronting our wounds is that we don’t know what lies on the other side of honest assessment. We don’t know where it will lead us. Selak agrees: “If we recognize the harm that’s done, what does it look like to repair that harm? Does it mean we’re changing governance practices, changing programming, asking different questions about where the money goes?”

They’re all just too phobic and might have to allow me to become a priest and, oh, they’re stealing money. They’re terrified of change. Has zero to do with God. Nothing at all.

“I want to believe that God is always calling us to something greater, something deeper, something truer, something more authentic, something more whole,” Selak says. “And that’s also more scary because we don’t know what that looks like.”

I want to believe God is always calling us to something greater like genital mutilation, women priestesses and completely re-writing the English language.

Intriguingly, the journey she imagines for the church in confronting its own wounds seems very much akin to the journey of transgender people. “If we’re all created in the image and likeness of God,” she poses, “there’s also a sense of self as mystery.” Reconsidering one’s name, gender or pronouns, she argues, is part of the broader dynamic of growing in our sense of self that we all go through over the course of our lives. “New contexts bring out new parts of ourselves, new life phases bring out new parts of ourselves.” 

Uh, I got nothing. We’re all transgender now?

In the end, says Selak, “We are all naming our gender, our identities for ourselves.” And recognizing that, “We’re ethically obligated, when people tell us who they are to honor that, to respect that and to recognize that.”

God is dead. The end.

Contrary to what Jesuits and their affiliates tell you, no Jesuit or affiliate was actually harmed in the making of this satirical piece. Just me getting in touch with my in-touchness.

This is also a friendly reminder that friends don’t let friends near Jesuits.

 

 

 

10 thoughts on “I Am the Jesuit Whisperer”

  1. I do declare indeed. Gina Pizza (what do names matter?) sounds like Nefarious. Haven’t seen the movie yet, but hoping it will get people to stand up and stopped listening to these lies. As usual, carry on OMM & God bless you!

  2. Wow. If you were spoofing these “experts” you couldn’t be more ridiculous than they already are. What a crock of gobbeldygook. I can just imagine them explaining to God what he really meant when giving Moses His name or why he changed the names of Abraham, Sarah, et al. When I clicked through to the article and saw the photo of the Jesuit author without a Roman collar, which is the way he wants to be recognized, I got PTSD. It reminded me of the Jesuit university I attended back in the ’80s when most of the priests wanted to be called by just their first name (Call me “Dan” or “Steve”). No thank you. Then I left for an evangelical church until I found Mother Angelica who pulled me back in. Can you imagine what she would say to these poor idiots? But they wouldn’t hear her. Their ears are stopped up with all those fancy degrees. I feel massively sorry for them and all the time they are wasting.

  3. I was thinking, “If only the Holy Office would declare such throughts anathema, and place the authors on the Index Prohibitum Librorum.” Alas, there is no Holy Office, and there is no Index. There are no excommunications (except those who follow the Catholic faith and not the Conciliar religion). Thanks, Roncalli/John XXIII.

    1. There is a very good, thorough documentary at youtube titled

      “Saint” John Paul II Exposed”

      published at youtube by www dot vaticancatholic dot com. The documentary includes remarkable footage of JP II and was filmed during his papacy.

      “…the distinguishing mark of the Antichrist, man has with infinite termerity put himself in the place of God…the substitution of man for God.’ -Pope Pius X

  4. There have been a lot of folks through history who have been convinced that their truth was all they needed. They trampled other people’s truths in order to dominate or kill them. Every war, every conquest, every colonization, every enslavement, every instance of torture and more have been accomplished by one group or person imposing their truth. from the first humans who’s groups fought to the extinction of all but homo sapiens to Ghenghis Kahn to the Spartins, the Babylonians and the Romans, the armies of the Chinese Emperor to Sultans, the Goths, Visagoths, the Vandals and the Gauls, the Vikings and the Normans to the Holy Roman Empire and the rise of the armies of the Rising Sun, the Socialists, National Socialists, the Military Industrial Complex and the ME GENERATION and more have tried to impose “MY TRUTH” on fellow humans.

    1. Here is an excerpt from a 1921 sermon on the Catholicity of the Church by Rev. John H. Stapleton that assesses perfectly the deliberate stupefaction that results when Divine revelation is rejected.

      “Common sense makes it clear to us that contradiction is the destruction of truth, that compromise with error is its denial. To allow a thing to be at one and the same time true and false, is to stultify oneself mentally and morally. To let go the truth once consciously possessed, is the lowest form of moral cowardice; to receive as truth that which is not known to be the truth, is a crime against the human mind and Almighty God. No official expounder of Divine teachings can allow them to be altered under penalty of making God a liar, God Who is Truth Itself. It is in obedience to this fundamental principle that the Catholic Church as the One true Fold has always put forth Unity as one of her marks of Divine origin and remained faithful to it even when men would prefer otherwise. God is not where disorder is; His truth is not where contradiction is. His revealed Word, having been delivered into the keeping of man, is to be found where the teaching is one, as truth is one and as God is one”

      –Rev. John Stapleton on the Catholicity of the Church (1921).

  5. Pingback: THVRSDAY MORNING EDITION – Big Pulpit

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