The Church that (doesn't) want us. With Belotti, Lazzarini and Letizia for a feminist and queer christianity
Review by Lorenzo Russo
The Church that (doesn't) want us. For a feminist and queer christianity is the very recent publication by Elisa Belotti, Paola Lazzarini and Sandra Letizia, already authors of the podcast Cristianə to whom? For a feminist and queer christianity.
In this volume, published by Edizioni Tlon, the writers have dedicated themselves, according to intersectional perspectives, to collecting in a single text the doctrines and practices that exclude from community life of faith those who diverge from the definitions of Catholic orthodoxy.
Through historiographical paths, through precise references to magisterial documents and statistical data, Belotti, Lazzarini and Letizia trace the coordinates of paths that are never banally thematic, always lived as experiences of the flesh.
The Church that (doesn't) want us it is therefore configured as a concrete examination of reality: painful, as only it can be for the bodies on which this reality has been imposed; liberating, as it ends up revealing itself to those who follow the haunted paths with the awareness of being heretical people in the faith, or rather Christian people because they are free in their choice.
Diego Passoni writes in the Preface: "[...] our religious experience has often remained anchored to pre-adolescent preparation [...] with those notions of catechism mixed with memories of devotional gestures [...] which, however, are no longer enough."
It is from the observation of this insufficiency that queer believers of every place and time take steps to re-signify their own experiences of faith, indeed plural lives that have nothing to do with the presumed singularity of a religion which, among other meanings, is very often a binding.
What do we find, then, in this volume?
The complexity of being a crossroads, in the same body, of institutional policies and free decisions of conscience.
Life generated by a creativity that is divine because it shapes the multiform from the formless.
The need to see the whole which is the fractional, recognizing the differences and naming the discriminations.
The Church that (doesn't) want us it is, finally, a prayer, for how many and how many praying means re-generating a word of justice, which is God.
