Events such as “Non-binary perspectives on faith, God and church”, “Jesus loves trans*” or “Reading the Gospel of John queer” have found their way onto the Catholic Day. And in April of this year, the KjG, the Catholic Young Community, announced that they were now writing God “God” to include multiple gender identities. All of this leads to the always same, ritualized insanity dances of opponents and supporters. At some point everyone is talking about opinion dictatorship, gender madness, left-green conformity or the normalization of right-wing thinking.
Everyone involved is completely wrong. Both those who believe gendering God now or saying Jesus loves trans* is progressive and those who want to crusade to fight it.
The basis of Christianity is belief in Jesus Christ, the Redeemer. And the story of procreation is more modern than any Christopher Street Day ever was. In the Gospel of Luke, an angel comes and tells Mary, a young woman who is dating the much older handyman Joseph, that she is about to give birth to the Son of God. Maria is a little surprised. In the Bible the encounter between Mary and the angel is recorded as follows:
“Then Mary said to the angel, How can this be, since I don’t know of any man? The angel answered and said to her: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore also that holy thing which is born shall be called the Son of God.”
So to summarize, Maria, who is in a (perhaps even open) relationship with Joseph, is impregnated by a bodiless trans(cendent) being. There was no penetration. The act of procreation was, in the best sense of postmodern feminism, anti-patriarchal. Since Joseph is not the biological father of the child, one can speak of a patchwork family in the case of Mary, Joseph and Jesus.
In addition, of course, God is nonbinary. He is an asexual, non-material being. God has neither penis nor vulva, neither testicles nor clitoris. He can neither mansplain nor need his nipples freed. God is God, so by no means can it be sorted into something as banal as dual gender. God is bigger than genitals.
In German grammar, God is masculine. But the deity is already female. The grammatical sex does not have to correspond to the biological sex or the human-made conception of it. The vagina is called le vagin in French, meaning male. In a modern way, one could speak of this word as a crossdresser.
The efforts of the supposedly progressives to rethink the church is perfectly valid, as is the opposing position of keeping it traditional. But both sides should please read the basis of their faith, namely the Holy Scriptures, correctly. Then most of the sham battles over the concept of family, gender identity, reproductive medicine and so on would finally come to an end.
Because the Catholic Church will not become more modern even with a workshop on sex-positive flexitarianism.
