The lightly edited transcript of a talk given by James Alison at the 5th biennial meeting of the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics (GNRC) held in Madrid on 22-25 August 2025.
Thank you very much indeed. And it’s indeed lovely to be here and to see so many old friends from all around the world with whom I have shared space, time, retreats and meetings before. So it’s wonderful to be here again at this the 10th anniversary of the GNRC, and I want to do two things with you today. I want to lead us into a way of understanding how we’ve got to where we are; and then begin to open up a discussion which I hope we can take further over the next days, weeks and years or at least months about where we should go. And I’m not here talking about where we should go as GNRC. I’m talking about where we should go as gay and lesbian bisexual and trans people as Catholics in the new church that is opening up and has been opening up for us since Pope Francis. Does that that make sense?
Those of you who’ve heard me speak before, know that I’m a disciple of the thought of a man called René Girard, a very significant French thinker. One of the ideas with which he is associated is the idea of the scapegoating mechanism. You all know how scapegoating works. Why do you all know? Because you’ve all lived it one way or another. We’ve lived it whether as victim or as participant in a crowd or as is usually the case in most of us, in both roles but in different parts of our lives. The mechanism, however, we understand well enough. There’s a group of people, a bit depressed, not really much going on, some squabbling among themselves, and mysteriously they find themselves being drawn together over against somebody whose fault it all is. And it’s not as though they deliberately do this. It’s just that mysteriously forces seem to suggest that this is the fault of a particular person, or group, and eventually some leader arises who can point towards such and such a person and, we fall in line, and oh yes, yes, it really is that person’s fault. The more we become convinced of it, the more we forget our little rivalries and our little disagreements, and the more we’re able to become strong and united against whoever it is.
We all know this from our personal history, from school playgrounds, and of course from our wonderful political leaders at a worldwide scale. This is not rocket science. Now, one of the interesting things about the scapegoat mechanism is that it’s usually pretty savvy as to who it picks. Upon whom does the finger fall? Traditionally, it falls on someone who’s half an insider, half an outsider. Why? Well, because if you’re with a group of people who are like you but are squabbling, if you choose someone who’s too much like you, then other people will say, “No, not them. They’re one of us.” It’ll be very difficult actually to create unity over against that person if they’re too like us. And the same is true if they’re too unlike us. If they’re really very much an “other” from an “other” culture, another world, then they’re more an object of fascination than they are an object of hostility because they’re so different that they don’t seem a threat to us. Getting rid of them wouldn’t make us feel better. So the ideal person is someone who’s fairly like us but also fairly unlike us. A half insider half outsider.
Why? Well, if they’re in that liminal space, that half insider half outsider space, then as we gather our unity, it so it becomes clear who and what the “other” is. They can be defined because they’re also half like us. It means that the expulsion is actually the expulsion of part of us. So that has meaning for us. So again all of this you know, all of this is perfectly clear, and as you all know in European history we are masters at this game (not that it doesn’t happen in other countries) but the traditional scapegoats in the European Middle Ages were in the first place the Jews. The Jews were the classic half insider, half outsider. So, racially “like us”, but religiously “not like us”. And then the second group, half insider, half outsider, were gypsies or Romany people or Travellers depending on which is their preferred name. But again, people who were always around but also always apart and could easily be accused of stealing things. And then the third people were us. Yes! “los maricones” the queers. We were the third group. Again, we’re all like our respective groups, but also we’re a little bit unlike. So, we were a very good, very useful scapegoat.
Now, curiously, that didn’t mean that we were constantly victims, just as it didn’t mean throughout the European Middle Ages that Jewish people were constantly victims, or that Gypsies were constantly victims. What it did mean is that in moments of great tension, whether because a plague broke out or there was a foreign invasion, as when Genghis Khan and the Mongolian horsemen came across the plains or there was a harvest failure because of a change in the weather patterns: the kinds of dangerous things which threatened our unity and our capacity to survive. It was in those moments that there were particular outbreaks of scapegoating. It’s very interesting. The historians who studied this say in the first centuries Christians and Jews coexisted pretty well. There was only one major massacre in Christian territories of Jewish groups before the arrival of Islam. When Islam appeared, there started to be more Christian massacres of Jews and indeed more Islamic massacres of Jews. Why? Because the two groups were big and strong and fought each other to a kind of a stasis. And if you’re fighting a big enemy other and you can’t get anywhere, what do you do? You take your frustration out on a small enemy other. Scapegoating works by proxy. It’s unity by proxy.
Again, we gay people have been part of that reality as well. Now our story over the last 400 years or
so has been in pre-colonial and then colonial European contexts. In the old pre-modern homosocial world, boys and girls were brought up separately and therefore there was a huge don’t ask don’t tell about what went on amongst women. As long as you don’t talk about it, no one notice. And the same amongst men: As long as you don’t talk about it, no one notices. Many of you who will have visited Islamic countries or live in Islamic countries now, know exactly how this works. Something is omnipresent but invisible in the old homosocial world. But what happened in Western European countries over the last 400 years has been the gradual collapse of the homosocial world as we have become more heterosexualized.
Strangely, we’ve become not only heterosexual, which I believe the majority always were, but also heterosocial, meaning the presumption is that you make your best friends with, and marry, someone of the other sex. And what happened during those 400 years was that people like us became more visible as outsiders. In other words, instead of being occasional scapegoats as in the Middle Ages, we became regularly visible dangerous people. And so from the 17th century onwards we became the subject of interest by the “king’s men”, the “city guards” or police. We became identified as weird people who might be criminals, traitors, heretics. And then, as medicine started to develop in the 18th century we became “sick people” who needed “normal” people to work out what was the medical problem with us. And then in the 19th century we were mentally ill people who needed to be sent to asylum since that was the way that they dealt with the problematic “other”.
Then as you know, towards the very end of the 19th century people began to say: but wait a second they’re not a problematic “other” really, they’re just people who are that way. That, as of course you know, was when the word homosexual was invented. 1869 for those who weren’t sure of it. That was when for the first time we began to be talked about as people who just were that way rather than people who did certain sorts of dangerous and bad acts that needed to be controlled. What really made a difference over the following 40 or 50 years were the collateral effects of two world wars: the mass mobilization from small villages and small towns all over the place of young men to the army and of young women to the armament factories. This led, amazingly, to people starting to meet other people like themselves. “I thought I was the only gay in the village, but now I’m in the army. Wow, there are a lot of us. We can have fun”. Same with the girls in the arms factory.
Indeed, one of the very first predominantly women’s community was in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the period between the first and the second world war as women started to move and come together. There are many very famous artworks from that period. But it was the same with the men when they were set free from the army. Those who were lucky enough to live, they went to live in large cities where they could be themselves. And with that, people were able to study us not as criminals or heretics or dangerous people or sick. But simply people who were that way. And by the mid 1950s, it had become absolutely clear that there was no pathology that was proper to us. In other words, we are as screwed up as everybody else, but no more and no less screwed up than everybody else. And that our sexual orientation is not a significant factor in our screwed-upness.
What may very well be a significant factor is minority stress. You know the difference, I hope, you know what minority stress factor is? It means that even if there’s nothing wrong with you at all if you’re in a small minority in your social group, there are all sorts of factors that make you feel odd. If you’re a left-handed person in a right-handed society, you always feel a bit left out. If you’re a black person in a white person’s society, you suffer from minority stress. If you’re a white person in a black society, you suffer from minority stress. It’s got nothing to do with who you are, but with the surrounding. That was a great breakthrough that happened in the 1950s and it started to percolate through the world thereafter. As you know, we were taken off the World Health Society’s mental disorder list in the 1990s. Different medical societies from different countries took us off earlier.
This meant we found ourselves starting to be alive and relatively free, fighting for our rights, beginning just to be accepted as we are and starting to have our relationships recognized in different parts of civil society. Obviously, this is not a quick process. As I say this process took 400 years in Western Europe. So when we then think “well we must go to Africa and it must happen immediately”, I say “I wish, and I bet you guys from Africa also wish that it could be as fast as that”. But you can think how slowly it took us to even begin to be able to start to tell our truth and live our truth freely. Then you understand how every society has to work through its own scapegoating demons.
Then of course what we found as Catholics and Christians was that just as things began to become easier for us in the civil world, they started to get worse in the Church world. Why? Well, because when things were very difficult in the civil world, the safest place to be, was in the Church. If you were a lesbian woman, you could live in an all-female community. If you were a gay man, you could play dress up with as amazing costumes as you liked and be treated with respect. Because people would say, “It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, so it must be a priest. And for a long time, from the beginning of the 19th century, until towards the end of the 20th century at least, until the 1960s and 70s, it was still the safest place to be.
However, as civil society started to get safer, what happened? I’m afraid a generation of people born in a very much more frightening, scapegoating world tried to block everything down. What used to be what I call a relatively benign form of hypocrisy, the old-fashioned “don’t ask, don’t tell”, became a now mandatory, and very oppressive “don’t ask, don’t tell”. And of course that forced a much a much more aggressive form of hypocrisy and dishonesty and cognitive dissonance on people. until finally, you remember, in 2005 we got the formal statement that no gay people could enter the seminary.
It was more or less completely disobeyed, of course. It merely meant that only those best able to play the cognitive dissonance game or those who had friends on the inside who were able to help them jump through the hoops, would be allowed in. In other words, a previous generation of people who fled scapegoating became themselves massive scapegoaters. And what we now know, thanks amongst other things to Frederick Martel’s book [1], is how completely the group of cardinals that surrounded John Paul II – and not only cardinals, but people like Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ – quite how completely these were people of violent and dangerous double lives. On the one hand, they were all paladins in the war against LGBT people, us. And in all cases that we know apart from Joseph Ratzinger, they were people of double lives. As far as we know, Joseph Ratzinger was not the bearer of a double life. But all the others, Sodano, Lopez Trujillo, you know the names, you know the stories. These were terrifying people. I think that by the time that Ratzinger became Pope, the cognitive dissonance within the clerical system was so strong that it was clearly unbearable.
So it was an enormous relief when Francis became pope and started to indicate more by signs than anything else that he didn’t actually mind having gay people around the place provided that they weren’t playing silly queens. By “silly queens” he meant all that clerical dress-up frippery which he referred to as “frociaggine”. You remember that? It was treated by some as though he was attacking gay people. Some people tried to use it to drive a wedge between Pope Francis and us. But in context, it was perfectly clear. He was saying “enough with the Gamarelli queens”. Gamarelli being the famous Roman tailor responsible for “exquisite” robes for Cardinals and others.
Francis was able to distinguish clearly between gay people and a phenomenon which he had observed very closely: those extremely rigid homophobes who were themselves gay men with a double life and were those who are most strongly divisive on this issue within the church. People of whom he had had personal experience as archbishop in Buenos Aires and people with whom he then had experience in the Curia. In the first of the Synods over which he presided, there was an incredibly violent reaction by some Bishops to this issue being treated in a more friendly way in the Vatican. Francis’ appointments in the Vatican at first underestimated the degree of violence that this opening would produce.
Why? Well, because the scapegoating mechanism produces something sacred. The unity that you get at the expense of the scapegoat produces a feeling of something holy and good. And these guys had been brought up with their goodness depending on them scapegoating people like themselves. This, if you like, has been the tragedy of so much of our church’s life until recently, which is people surviving by scapegoating, creating a fake goodness by scapegoating themselves and people like themselves with a view to having a firm and sacred mission of what they must wipe out and how they must evangelize people and how they must send people to different forms of conversion therapy. We all know this is as the world in which we had been living up till then. So those people were very, viscerally angry with what Pope Francis was doing.
Now luckily Pope Francis lived long enough to be able to see many of them off and also to have very wisely signalled as his successor someone who understands that game and is not going to play it. How do we know? Well, Leo’s bishops’ appointments: the appointments he has made both while he was in charge of the bishops under Pope Francis and on his own. Wherever there has been an appointment to a major see, it has been put in the hands of someone who is more gay friendly. In other words: whereas before if you were publicly hateful towards gay people, it would likely be a help to your chances of promotion. Now it’s the reverse.
Why is this important? Several of us here, maybe many of us here, in a couple of weeks, we’ll be going through the Holy Door in Rome on a pilgrimage organized by, amongst others, Alessandro who’s here with us. We have this extraordinary privilege. Think of it this way. You remember the Gospel story of the Gerasene demoniac? Remember that story? Jesus crosses a lake and the crazy person, the Gerasene demoniac comes rushing down crying, “What have you to do with us, Son of the most High?” They’re in a gentile country. How do you know that? Because there were pigs nearby. Remember that? The story of the Gerasene demoniac and the pigs. People usually remember the pigs because they all jump into the lake together. Jesus is about to expel the demon from the man. But the demons ask to be sent completely out of the local countryside because they depend on the bad vibes of the local people. They are all the bad vibes that the people of Gerasa had previously dumped on Crazy Joe.
He was their whipping boy. In fact, he was such a good whipping boy that he’d imitated them and taken up self-harm. He whipped himself. He gashed himself. He broke chains. He lived amongst the tombs. In other words, everything that was shame and violence in that society, he absorbed and lived himself. So the demons didn’t want to go away because they knew that they would go out of existence without the bad vibes of the local people. Jesus said, “Okay, go into the pigs.” So they go into the pigs and the pigs, they’re not humans. So they can’t sit around in a group and point a trotter at one of them and say, “You can be the scape-pig and we’ll throw you over the precipice.” No, it’s only humans can do that. We’ve learned how to survive violence by joining together and blaming someone. Pigs haven’t. So they rush down the hill into the sea. And it says that they drowned, which is odd, because pigs can actually swim pretty well. But that’s another story.
What happens next is that the town’s people come out and see what’s happened. They see the former demoniac seated, clothed, and in his right mind. And for them that is something terrifying. Why? Because they’re used to seeing him unclothed or with his clothes all torn and completely out of his mind. And that suited them because they knew what good was because he was bad. He is crazy. We are sane. But if he is seated, clothed and in his right mind, then who the f*** are we? We are no longer sure, we don’t know who we are. Our carpet, someone has pulled the carpet out from under our feet. We no longer know how the sacred works. So they say to Jesus, “Uh, would you awfully mind going away?” They don’t get all cross. They’re very courteous. They say, “please go” and Jesus says that’s fine. The formerly crazy guy then says, “Oh can I come with Jesus too”. He wants to follow Jesus. Now Jesus usually tells people to follow him, but on this occasion, he says to the formerly crazy guy “No, you stay. Go home to your family and friends and tell them what great things the Lord has done for you”. Why? Because if the formerly crazy guy were to follow him, it would feel too much like an expulsion. It would just be the logical continuation of the expulsion from his people. Whereas what Jesus wants is this person who is now clothed, seated, and in his right mind and can speak and tell the truth. He wants him to speak among his own people as what he is, a son of God.
Bizarrely, that is our situation. When we go through the Holy Door, or even if you don’t yourselves, when you see us going through the Holy Door, you will be seeing people who are seated, clothed, and their right mind as themselves, as the son and daughter of God that we are. We will be alongside everybody else as a son and daughter of God, and openly as gay people. And this is a wonderful thing for us, which is why it’s such a significant few days I think for us both here and in Rome. Remember, however, this is deeply destabilizing for people for whom our being bad was necessary for them to be good. And our role going forward, it seems to me, is: being the adults in the room, which is difficult.
So, what I’d like to do is to float some questions concerning how we take this forward. what it’s going to be like to live being church just as we are in this sinful world. And I’m going to do it by means of four different, or maybe five different, very short headings.
The first one is foundation.
Should we be thinking of founding something? Now if we hear “founding something” I think we immediately get the wrong idea. “I want to be a founder just like Monsignor Balaguer or just like Figari and whoever else founded the Sodalicio in Peru, or like Marcial Maciel or any of the founders of the late twentieth century movements” But almost all of these are now under some sort of intervention. Almost all of them are undergoing some sort of de-founding. For them a foundation meant a charismatic figure with strong ideas, having a very tight and hierarchically controlled group with strong insiders and outsiders and very moralistic instruction and you sign up and you obey and you fit in and then everything is fine. And of course, a lot of people like that. It gives people a sense of strong belonging. But of course, strong belonging is what goes with the scapegoat mechanism. And the history of those groups is that they have become strongly sectarian, and deeply abusive, spiritually, morally and sexually, while usually becoming very rich.
So what I am looking at is a sort of “un-foundation” characterised by weak belonging.
Weak belonging is what happens when you start to undo from within the kind of belonging that depends on a wicked other. It’s what happens when you start to realize how much we have been run by that sort of mechanism. So the idea of we LGBT Catholics founding something in the sense that has been normal up to now seems to me to be a bad and a dangerous idea. And it wouldn’t work anyway. Thank heavens.
Why? Well, because of almost all of us have some sort of experience of having belonged in one form or other to strong forms of belonging and it went badly. Would that not be true? Many of us have been tempted to forms of strong belonging and then we found ourselves destroyed by them. And we also all have an advantage in this area, which is one of the reasons why I think we are going to be important as the synodal church starts to develop. Our advantage is that one of the things about being lesbian or gay or bi or trans is that we don’t start off knowing it. We discover it along the way. It takes us time to work out that we don’t quite fit in. Isn’t that true? Almost all of us have some sort of adolescent learning experience where we realize that we’re never going to make it in the ordinary rules of the game because that’s not quite us. So we have to start being creative in working out who we are to be, how we are to belong, how to create family, friends. Because there are no models into which we fit.
And guess what? Because we have been doing that, we are well placed to help other people. I would say particularly in this sphere. Nowadays, particularly young straight males who precisely because they have never had to make this kind of journey themselves, are feeling seriously lost because all the old things that used to give them strong belonging don’t any longer. But there are viperous people out there trying to offer them cheap forms of strong belonging with very nasty political and racial consequences as we all know in all our societies. And it’s very, very important that we see ourselves as starting to help those kind of people begin to acquire a way, for instance, in which they might actually be able to make friends with women. I know that sounds a really weird thing to say, but when we remember that heterosexuality is a cultural reality, not a biological one, there is a strong crisis of heterosexuality going on at the moment. And we, for reasons of scapegoating, had to work our way through it beforehand, just as women have had to work their way out of male assumptions about their place in society.
I think this is a very important point to how we develop something non-foundational. How do we develop a form of being together that is real, that gives a certain sort of belonging, that enables us to understand we are doing something together and yet which is not tempted into a stronger “we” forged “over against” others, and is actually able to help others with the learning process which we have found ourselves having to do. Anyhow, I think that that’s a very significant thing. So, a “not-a-foundation”, weak belonging rather than strong belonging with the capacity to navigate cultural changes. Let’s remember that each one of these things the church initially will find difficult to understand. Most of the formation of the clergy follows the model whereby: “Don’t be who you are. Let’s have some strong belonging. Let’s get youth all wired up on the same side”. This doesn’t work and is not healthy. And future Christian communities, they’re not going to work that way. So, how do we help build communities of weak belonging without hierarchical structures that play to that “tell me who you want me to be and I will be it” which many people want, but which does them no good. It didn’t work for us, and we know it won’t work for them. Does that make sense?
A third consideration is about place.
So not a foundation, weak belonging. And now, place: actual physical place. One of the things which I’ve noticed now having been attempting to work in this ministry over the last 30 years and living in many different countries and having visited many of you in many different countries is that a common problem is always physical space. It is very rare that we have our own physical space in which to meet. Often, we’re dependent on the kindness of a church group, whether Catholic or ecumenical. But if it’s Catholic, we’re always vulnerable to a change of superior, and them suddenly turning nasty or wanting to control the space, and through it, to control us. I’m sure you’ve all had experiences like that. Or again, we may have been dependent on a political or municipal space. Well, that’s also nice enough, but by and large they don’t particularly want the Eucharist, for instance, to be celebrated on their space. Though they may well tolerate prayer.
How are we going to get our own space? A space of prayer, of meeting, a space to incubate ideas as to how we may help others. One of the things which has occurred to me and I’ve been pushing this with friends. (Let me say here that I couldn’t administer my way out of the paper bag, which is why there’s no threat of my becoming a founder of anything at all). Nevertheless the idea of setting up some sort of small cooperative business that is able to pay for its own space, employ people, and have enough meeting room for people actually to be able to come together for socialization, for prayer, for Eucharist, for thinking creatively. So I would ask us to think how do we face up to the place issue rather than being, as it were, beggars, dependent on the kindness of others which is often a very ambiguous kindness. As we’re able to stand up and be ourselves, what can we take responsibility for as regards place? Then the next question, this is the penultimate one. Don’t worry, I’m getting there.
The next question after place is prayer.
Part of weak belonging is shared prayer. It’s an ability, whether by ourselves or together to have some kind of structure of prayer that makes sense to us. That is, if you like, both a sign of our belonging and a draw to our belonging. For me, absolutely central to that is the possibility of shared Eucharist. And I’m very glad that some here remember the shared Eucharist we used to have in my flat in São Paulo where with about 20 people, not more than 20 people, you can have shared Eucharist in which there’s genuine sharing so that the gospel comes alive in the stories of people who learn from each other much more as we share. And one of the advantages that we have for these things is that by and large we’re not frightened of being sinners and therefore we don’t need to pretend so much. We’re able to share our stories with less fear of what people will think about our asses. We can speak “a calzón quitado” as our Chilean friends say – with our underwear off. This is a good phrase. Where sinners are able to share, Jesus is present. Where the self-righteous gather, Jesus runs away. So what is the space of shared prayer and place to be for us now?
And at last this is my final question: what might our mission mean?
And again I can think of various ideas, but I think that each group will need to find its own mission. This comes with our realization that now that we are insiders, sons and daughters of God in a less clerical church, it’s no longer a question of us begging for permission to be there. It’s a question of us actually being the church, making it available for other people. And I would have thought that one of the key things we face in almost all of our countries now is the issue of migration and at least here in Spain, migration with people from the Islamic world where dealing with matters LGBT is quite different. It’s not necessarily brutal, but the ability to live faith openly within that reality is something that really needs attention. Then there are other forms of migration, such as the displacement migration which our brother Benjamin Oh works with in Australia and South East Asia. And often it is especially the trans and non-binary communities that need help and attention because they are forced into flight.
How might we be part of establishing the church’s welcome in those situations or in whatever other form of precariousness we can identify with? Because that is how we find ourselves like the Samaritan next to the person whose guts are spilling out. That is how we find ourselves moved by God’s guts when we see the precarious other as ourselves. Remember that story. That story is to do with guts. It says the Samaritan was moved with compassion. But actually the word is his guts went out towards the half-dead man. That’s what it means in Greek. And it refers to God’s guts being moved. God’s entrails, God’s viscera being moved. What was it moved by? It was moved by the viscera of the nearly dead man. So how are we to create neighbourliness which is what that parable was about?
So, if I may, I’m not asking you for immediate answers to any of these questions. I just wanted to float in your midst the possibility of us moving from being supplicants to a generous adult position which many of us, of course, do personally in any case. But I’m asking us to think together about ways to do it in which we face up to issues without falling back into ghastly institutions which cover up and are cruel and torture and abuse whether spiritually or physically which we all know about.
What is going to be, for us LGBT Catholics, the shape of belonging, with voluntarily chosen and supported space, prayer that makes sense for the group, and a mission of equal hearted precariousness, where we want to be found at our post by the Lord.
Thank you very much.
James Alison
Madrid August-September 2025
[1] In French, Spanish, and Italian Sodoma; in English In the closet of the Vatican.