[[ Dear Sister, would the church profess or consecrate a transsexual (transgender?) as a diocesan hermit? I don't want to give more details. I just wondered if there are any hard and fast rules about this. Would you encourage a transsexual to seek profession and consecration under c 603? It seems to me that since there is no community, no one would be particularly troubled much less harmed by such an act. Are you aware of any transsexuals who are diocesan hermits? Thanks.]]
Thanks for your questions. Let me begin with some comments about transgender persons and sacraments as a preliminary to answering your questions. This might give you an introductory sense of how seriously the church takes the question of allowing transgendered persons to be professed and consecrated as religious. From all that I have read about the church's stance on transgendered persons in this regard, two considerations are always raised: 1) the honesty or lack of honesty involved (including self-honesty, potential self-deception, or questions of personal transparency), and 2) the possibility of scandal. The person involved must be acting freely, openly, and transparently, and there must be no cause for scandal. Still, there is relatively little out there in writing from the church. In speaking about the sacraments, for instance, the church only speaks of baptism as clearly open to transgendered persons (and some dioceses may still be disputing that). After that, things become even more complicated. Even having a transgendered person serving as a godparent for someone is not without complications. While religious profession and consecration are not sacraments, admission of a transgendered person to these definitive steps of public commitment within religious life raises even more difficult questions that also revolve around the questions of honesty or personal integrity and scandal.****
Consecrated Life: A Call to Foundational Womanliness or Manliness
With consecrated eremitical life, some of these same questions apply whether we are speaking of semi-eremitical life or solitary eremitism under c 603. Remember that the profession of a diocesan hermit is a public commitment with public rights and obligations. This means the whole church has a right to hold certain expectations concerning the one being professed and/or consecrated. The most fundamental of these, no matter whether the person identifies as male or female, has to do with their foundational womanliness or manliness and their fulfillment**. Are they gifting God and the Church with their lives in this way because they (and those discerning with them!) sincerely believe they are being called to human wholeness and holiness (including a recognizable psycho-sexual maturity) in this state of life in Christ or is there something else at play here? Stated another way, are they embracing this life because they (and those discerning with them) feel assured that God's love for them calls and will bring them to psycho-sexual maturity, that is, to the highest expressions of manliness or womanliness one may achieve in this way or not? Will they witness to this foundational task and achievement as well as to the way God's non-gendered and self-sacrificial love makes it both a possibility and reality?
First and foremost, a vocation to eremitical life is a call to human wholeness and holiness in loving dialogue with God in the silence of solitude. This can occur in the presence of various forms of gender dis-ease or gender dysphoria and other significant limitations. One gives the whole of oneself (including one's dis-ease) in the trust and expectation that God completes and makes one truly and fully alive in Christ with the abundant life promised in the Gospels. In fact, because the hermit gives up the use of so many specific gifts necessary for active ministry, this particular witness seems to me to be the essence of the eremitical call. The God of Jesus Christ is affirmed as the One who loves us just as we are and empowers us to love and live with whatever difficulties our lives include. We suffer with and in Christ in ways that witness to God's power to make sense of even life's worst apparent absurdities. We approach this promised achievement with hope that in giving ourselves totally (including what seems "broken" within us, so too will we find, complete, and transcend ourselves in Christ, and we do this for the sake of others who need and seek the same redemption and fulfillment.
The Church does not Recognize. . .
The church does not recognize that a person's fundamental manliness or womanliness (even as incipient) changes with gender-affirming transition. Moreover, the church identifies this fundamental given as consonant with one's sex at birth. Certainly, dimensions of one's fundamental manliness or womanliness are affected by hormones, genetic manipulation, and surgery, though in Catholic theology, these changed dimensions are not identical to a change in one's fundamental womanliness or manliness, one's foundational sexuality. Despite a person's profound and painful dis-ease with his or her assigned birth sex, that sexual identity remains a gift and a task s/he is meant to realize in psycho-sexual maturity within whatever given limitations or seeming inconsistencies there may be. Assuming no intersex problems cause physician errors in determining sex, the church's current teaching on admitting a suitable candidate*** to profession and consecration is clear: if one is born (or determined to be) female at birth, one must be professed and/or consecrated as a female; if born male, then profession/consecration must be as a male.
Though this is a dimension of one's vocation most will recognize in terms of the vow to chastity in celibacy, when the church clothes the candidate in religious garb or styles the person Brother or Sister it also reflects this truth. Given the church's own teaching here, how is the church to clothe and address a transgendered person who was originally female for instance? Though fundamentally a woman in the church's eyes, does this person style herself as Brother X_____ and represent a call to authentic manliness?
The church sees a profound contradiction here on the most fundamental human level; what one claims (to be) and proclaims at profession conflicts with one's natural sexual identity, and for this reason, the church does not admit someone
living as a transgendered person to profession or consecration. To do so would be dishonest and, if the professing bishop allowed the faith community to know about it in an entirely transparent way, it would cause significant scandal. (For that matter, were the bishop admitting a transgendered person to profession and consecration to knowingly withhold this from the faith community participating in the profession I think that too would legitimately cause significant scandal.)
In approaching your questions, I began with the most foundational element or dimension of the hermit's life because it is deeper and more extensive than the changes involved in gender-affirming transitions can change or achieve. It can be argued that the Evangelical Counsels and particularly the vow of chastity in celibacy (consecrated celibacy) can be understood in terms of this foundational identity as well as in other terms that may be more familiar to readers. Chastity in celibacy deals with integrity in relationships and the commitment to love others in the way Christ loved; thus, it also implies being true to one's fundamental manliness or womanliness to carry all of this out. As I understand the church's position, if gender (that is, the subjective experience of sexuality) fails to match one's sexuality (an objective reality not necessarily dependent upon or consonant with one's experience of one's sexuality), and one cannot love oneself as created and called to be, the ability to make a binding vow of chastity becomes problematic.
Are there Currently Transsexual Diocesan Hermits?
I am not aware of any transgendered persons who have been professed or consecrated as diocesan hermits. I am personally aware of only one transgender person who sought profession under c 603 several years ago. I opposed his admission to profession (he is a trans male),
but N.B., I did not do so based on the fact that he was transgendered per se, but instead because he approached profession as a solitary hermit deceitfully and fraudulently. This person told me he (purportedly along with his bishop) planned on using the canon as a "matter [or way] of [achieving] justice" and was clear he was using the canon as a stopgap way to get publicly professed, something he knew from reading this blog is objectionable. (He claimed to have discerned a call to "public profession"
but not to eremitical life; the church does NOT recognize such a call apart from particular forms of religious life which may then require public vows.) There were other issues as well (bishop-shopping for an amenable bishop, an intention to create (or join) a community after consecration, the use of temporary profession to experiment and "gather data" on whether or not this life was a fit
at all, among others), and in each of these, some degree of pretense and bad faith were apparent. Thus too, the validity of such a profession would have been questionable at best. (One canonist who was consulted opined the profession/vows would be invalid (cf c 656.4 and
On Withholding the Truth), while another suggested sacrilege could also be involved were such a profession attempted.)
As you might surmise, this instance of a proposed profession raises several important questions. The one I want to focus on here has to do with using profession and consecration as a means to take a stand on something one considers unjust in the church, or for any other reason than expressing and embracing a genuine sense of a call to consecrated life (and in this case, to solitary eremitic consecrated life). Canon 603 sometimes seems a simple canon for folks to seek profession under even when they have not discovered or discerned a truly eremitical vocation. Artists or scholars of all sorts might like to do something like this while they write or paint or work on dramatic, cultural, and research projects; sometimes such folks justify the peace and solitude needed for such careers in terms of a too-casually defined "eremitism". Authentic hermits know that the heart of the eremitic vocation is not writing, other artistic pursuits, or research even when hermits may also do these things. To call these (much less oneself) "eremitical" simply because they require silence and solitude is a distortion of what eremitical life lived in the name of the Church is all about. Still, it is easy to "justify" this kind of distortion of the vocation by asking the question (along with its implied negative answer) that you have raised yourself, "Whom does it hurt?"
As I have written before in Whom does it hurt? (see also Fundamental Questions for a more recent response to the same question), and also On Intervening in Professions, any kind of fraud is harmful, particularly when it concerns an institution that depends on trust and Gospel witness to the truth as well as to what is possible when one lives for, with, in, and from God in the silence of solitude. I simply cannot see any justification in the kinds of deception present in such instances when one is (ostensibly) petitioning to live consecrated eremitical life in the name of the same Church one is essentially thumbing one's nose at in the very same act. That is especially true when other ecclesial communities (including sacramental ones like the Episcopal Church, for example) allow individuals to be publicly professed as solitary religious without concern for sexual identity or a requirement that these religious purposely live genuinely eremitical lives. As you can see, questions of personal integrity, transparency, and the potential for scandal are significant in matters like this. Thus, unless and until church teaching and praxis on this changes (something I do not expect to see), though I might encourage them to explore life as a non-canonical hermit, I would not encourage a person identifying as transsexual to seek profession and/or consecration as a c 603 hermit.
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Notes:
Please note that language referring to trans persons is fluid and relatively idiosyncratic. For an introductory summary of how various terms are generally defined, please see https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/transgender-people-gender-identity-gender-expression. Especially helpful is the discussion of the distinction between sexual orientation and gender.
**In Catholic Theology and in this blog essay, sexuality is used to refer to the most foundational call to womanliness or manliness, not merely in terms of superficial social roles and expectations or even in terms of mere biology. It is deeper and more expansive than these while, especially in terms of one's given biology, it remains generally consistent with these. In Catholic theology, the whole person is sexual. There are distinctively manly and womanly ways of understanding, feeling, and acting. Everything we think, or imagine, our motivations and perceptions of or responses to value are conditioned by the fact that we exist either as men or as women. Catholic theology affirms this is true even in the presence of gender dysphoria, and whether or not a person self-identifies as male, female, or some non-binary alternative (transgender, transsexual, mx, zie, or hir) precisely because this manliness or womanliness is deeper and more fundamental than gender identity itself.
*** As I understand it, a suitable candidate would need first to "detransition" and then live and discern the vocation just as any other person would do. The same conditions, requirements, time frames, and so forth would have to be met including medical and psychological testing. One would need to go through the usual stages of such a life, particularly concerning the development of a contemplative life that then calls for even greater solitude. There would need to be a special assurance that the candidate was not using c 603 in some ulterior way as a stopgap to profession.
**** The Vatican published a document on the impossibility of allowing transgendered persons to ordination and religious profession/consecration in 2000. I have not seen the paper, but merely a few references to it, because it was put out "sub secretum" and is not accessible to most folks. If anyone has access to a copy of this document, I would like to read it!! Please let me know.
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