Now, I am transgender, so obviously his stance on this topic is of particular concern to me. It bothers me when I see him cherry-pick one study that argues against trans healthcare (built upon flawed methodology) as though it eliminates the consensus of all major modern medical associations. It bothers me when he ignores the responses and feedback I and others have provided to his work in the same paper he writes for. And it bothers me that his arguments against inclusion and respect for people like me all seem to hinge on political viability, rather than any genuine engagement with, for instance, Catholic teaching on human dignity.

There are also plenty of other reasons to be weary of him too. But I can hear the pearl-clutching now: “He’s not transphobic, he just thinks the trans movement has taken over the Democratic Party!” This is the part where I stare directly into the camera.

To be clear, I don’t think that MSW hates trans people. I do think that he platforms a lot of transphobic arguments, and I also think that his strategy for doing so is disingenuous — he’s just talking politics, after all, why should the consequences of his rhetoric concern him? He repeatedly supports and normalizes positions that would restrict trans people’s access to spaces, healthcare, recognition, and equal participation in society. This falls into the “discrimination” portion of Merriam Webster’s definition of transphobia.

Let’s talk through four examples of transphobia from one of his recent articles (and please note: there are quite a few articles of his to choose from on this topic), “Why the Dems need to bring common sense to the culture wars.”

1. He calls trans women “biological males.”

In his article, Winters writes “trans women, who are biological males.” This is not the neutral scientific language Winters seems to think it is. “Biological male” can mean a number of different things: chromosomes, reproductive anatomy, hormone levels, secondary sex characteristics, or some combination of them. Those characteristics do not always neatly align, and medical transition often substantially changes a person’s hormone profile and secondary sex characteristics. In other words, transition affects our biology.

So why insist on the phrase “biological male”? Because in this context, it isn’t actually being used to communicate a piece of medical information. It is being used to make a categorical statement about who trans women really are: not women, but “biological males.” The term tells us remarkably little about someone’s actual biology while telling us quite a lot about how the speaker wants us to understand someone’s gender.

Why this is transphobic: It invalidates trans women’s gender identity and uses their transgender status as the basis for exclusion.

2. He argues that trans women should be separated from women’s sports.

Winters argues that “there are some distinctions that matter in a sport — strength, height, and, yes, sex,” before asking, “Could there not be sporting leagues specifically for trans athletes?” He compares this proposal to the Paralympics.

The obvious problem is that this does not merely raise a question about how individual sports should establish eligibility rules. He is suggesting structural segregation of transgender people from the category in which they identify and live.

And the fairness question is considerably more complicated than Winters acknowledges. As I wrote in my review of the book Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports for NCR, athletic advantage has always existed in countless forms — strength and height are not so binary as he seems to imply. Trans athletes are also an extraordinarily small proportion of competitive athletes – certainly not enough to sustain a standalone league. The book (which I highly suggest reading, it includes great research and firsthand accounts from transgender athletes) makes a compelling case that the political fixation on trans athletes distracts from the longstanding issues actually undermining women’s sports, including underfunding and unequal resources.

Why this is transphobic: It treats transgender identity as a basis for segregation and exclusion from participation in sports.

3. He invokes trans women as a threat to “safe spaces” for cisgender women.

Winters refers to “the added concern for young women to have safe spaces in locker rooms and lavatories.”

This is one of the oldest and most persistent forms of anti-trans rhetoric: the suggestion that trans women represent an inherent threat to cisgender women simply by being present in women’s spaces. But the research does not support it. Studies have found no evidence that allowing transgender people to use facilities consistent with their gender identity increases rates of violence, assault, or privacy violations. In fact, the documented safety risks run in the opposite direction: transgender people are more likely to experience harassment, assault, or denial of access when they are forced to use facilities according to their sex assigned at birth.

Notice that Winters’ argument does not require a trans woman to actually do anything harmful: her identity itself becomes the source of suspicion and even danger.

Why this is transphobic: It stigmatizes trans women as potentially dangerous or inappropriate in public spaces and provides justification for excluding them from facilities consistent with their gender.

Related: There are many cisgender women who are comfortable sharing spaces with transgender women. Here’s one account, “An accomplished soldier, fired for no reason” by Anna Keating

4. He treats trans equality as a political liability.

Winters’ article is ultimately concerned with whether supporting us is politically advantageous. He describes trans issues as a “totem” of the culture wars, calls the positions of Democratic politicians “extreme” (despite the fact that there is no consensus amongst democrats — they do not all hold the same position on trans rights), and argues that Democrats need to distance themselves from organizations and activists advocating for trans rights.

What is striking is the hierarchy of whose concerns count. The concerns of cisgender people are treated as self-evidently legitimate. The concerns of transgender people, on the other hand, are entirely dismissed as a kind of political posturing. This is the key strategy Winters employs: constantly reducing transgender people to a talking point so that he never has to reckon with the realities of our lived experience.

Why this is transphobic: Transphobia does not require hatred. It can also operate by treating one group’s dignity and rights as negotiable while treating another group’s comfort and preferences as the default. When a marginalized group’s equality becomes something politicians are encouraged to abandon because voters might respond negatively, that is not neutrality. It is systemic discrimination.

Catholicism Has Something to Say About This

Fortunately, another writer at the National Catholic Reporter, Daniel Horan, recently took on MSW with a response that is actually Catholic.

Dan brings the conversation back to the fact that transgender people are not a “cultural issue,” a political liability, or a collection of abstractions against which everyone else’s feelings and anxieties must be weighed. We are people. And from a Catholic perspective, that should be the beginning of the conversation.

One of the foundational principles of Catholic Social Doctrine is the inherent and inalienable dignity of every human person. That dignity is not contingent upon whether a person’s existence is politically convenient, whether the majority finds them confusing, or whether accommodating them requires other people to rethink assumptions they have long taken for granted (what Winters would call “common sense”). Human dignity does not operate according to a hierarchy in which cisgender people’s discomfort, fears, or sense of normalcy automatically outrank transgender people’s ability to access healthcare, participate in public life, or live openly as themselves. Pope Francis understood this, which is why he supported civil unions for homosexual couples.

Catholic Social Doctrine does not begin by asking whether protecting a vulnerable minority is good politics. It begins with the recognition that every human being possesses inherent dignity and that our social and political structures should reflect that reality.

That does not mean every practical question involving transgender people has a simple answer. Dan, for instance, leaves room in his article for good-faith discussions about how communities can become more inclusive. But there is a profound difference between discussing how to uphold the dignity of transgender people and beginning with the assumption that our dignity is itself negotiable.

Conclusion

Perhaps the most revealing part of Winters’ argument is the way he describes ordinary solidarity with marginalized people as something that “makes Democrats sound weird” and “reeks of virtue signaling.” He says that he receives “nasty emails” when he writes about this, tone policing those who are rightly angered at his failure to recognize the dignity of transgender people. Then, he turns around and uses his own inflammatory language, declaring “it is time to stop the cultural nonsense.” It’s hard not to read that as an implication that transgender people ourselves are the “nonsense” he’s referring to.

The strategy is, Winters makes a political argument that dehumanizes a real marginalized group of people but deflects any responsibility for that dehumanization by referring back to the political container. Even if this wasn’t such a disingenuous rhetorical move, it remains a bad faith attempt to delegitimize concerns about transgender rights in the public square. He waves away his critics as emotionally motivated for rising to the defense of a real group of people that he has reduced to a “totem.” If the subject of your argument is actual human beings, then their dignity cannot become “nonsense” simply because defending it makes a political party sound unfashionable or costs it votes. Calling attention to the dignity of people who are routinely marginalized is not virtue signaling. It is, at its best, an expression of the most basic moral commitments of Catholic Social Doctrine.

Political arguments are never morally neutral when their subject is the rights and dignity of a marginalized group. When the proposed political strategy is to distance ourselves from trans people, restrict their participation, question their identity, and treat their equality as an electoral liability, the result is a political party that has abandoned a small group of people in order to curry favor with those who dehumanize us. And that is why calling this transphobia is not an accusation of personal hatred. It is an honest description of the consequences of the framework he is defending.

There is, indeed, room for nuance. There is room for disagreement about policy, for ongoing research, and for good-faith debate about difficult questions. But nuance cannot mean asking transgender people to accept that our rights, dignity, and participation are negotiable whenever they become politically inconvenient. If Catholicism means anything in this conversation, it means that we begin somewhere else: not with the polling numbers, not with the culture wars, and not with whether trans people make anyone feel “weird,” but with the person standing in front of us. We are not a cultural issue. We are people.

This week’s episode is one I’ve been looking forward to sharing for quite some time.

I’m joined by the Reverend Liz Edman, Episcopal priest and author of Queer Virtue, for a conversation that moves beyond the familiar debates about LGBTQ inclusion and asks a much deeper question: What if queer experience has something to teach Christianity?

Together we explore Liz’s understanding of queer virtue—the idea that queer life cultivates distinctive virtues through the work of truth-telling, discernment, courage, and community. We also discuss queerness as a theological lens, one that challenges false binaries, invites us into a richer “both/and” imagination, and helps us recognize the complexity of human experience and the presence of God within it. It’s an intellectually rich conversation that touches on vocation, priesthood, fundamentalism, the witness of marginalized communities, and why human suffering deserves to be taken seriously as a source for theological reflection.

I think many of you will find this episode both challenging and deeply hopeful, and I can’t wait to hear what resonates with you.

In other news, my recent webinar with Tyler Bieber on his new biography of Father Tom Oddo is now available on the LGBTQ Religious Archive Network YouTube channel. We had a wonderful conversation about Fr. Oddo’s life, ministry, and enduring legacy, and I’m grateful it’s now available for anyone who wasn’t able to join us live.

As always, thank you for listening, for reading, and for being part of this community. Your support makes these conversations possible, and I’m grateful you’re here.

Until next time,
Max

🎧 Listen to the podcast here on Substack (where you can toggle between video with subtitles and just the audio file, and read a transcript by clicking the button on the top of the episode page on the web), Spotify (which has video and in-app transcripts), Apple Podcasts (which has in-app transcripts), and YouTube.

For the past several months, I’ve enjoyed settling into a rhythm of publishing a new Whiplash episode every Monday and a new essay every Wednesday. Having that consistency has helped me build this space, and I’m grateful to everyone who’s made it part of their week.

As we move through the rest of the summer, though, I’m going to loosen that schedule a bit.

Rather than publishing every Monday and Wednesday, I’ll be sharing new podcasts and essays as they’re ready—when there’s something I genuinely can’t wait to explore, or when I have a conversation with someone I’m excited to share. I still have podcast guests lined up, essays in the works, and plenty of ideas I’m excited about. The only thing changing is the cadence.

Before I sign off, I also wanted to invite you to an upcoming webinar that I’m excited to be part of. On Thursday, July 23, at 8 p.m. Eastern (7 p.m. Central / 6 p.m. Mountain / 5 p.m. Pacific), I’ll be moderating a conversation with my friend, author Tyler Bieber about his biography, Against the Current: Father Tom Oddo and the New American Catholic. (Maddie Marlett and I spoke to Tyler for a Whiplash episode here as well). Co-hosted by LGBTQ-Religious Archive Network and New Ways Ministry, we’ll explore the remarkable life of Father Tom Oddo—an early leader of DignityUSA whose vision and leadership helped shape the movement for LGBTQ inclusion in the Catholic Church. If that sounds like your kind of conversation, I’d love to have you join us. Register here.

Thank you, as always, for reading, listening, and supporting this work. I’m looking forward to what’s ahead—and I think this new, more flexible rhythm will ultimately make for stronger conversations.

See you soon,
Max

I wrote this as a creative writing exercise, returning to a moment in my life where I was beginning to find myself for the first time, albeit with hesitant, cautious steps.

Maybe you have also experienced something like this before, too.

Please enjoy. Let me know if this resonates with you.

if I have to burn away to be transformed, let this be the flame

It is 2018 and I am sitting on a dock that stretches into Mobile Bay, in Alabama, a place where the sunlight seems endless; the dusk lingers in the humid air along with something else that lingers inside of me; a thought, a prayer, a dream? I am 27 and I have never really kissed someone. But now there’s someone sitting beside me on the wooden dock who wants to be kissed. Someone staring into the endless sunset next to me, her hand and mine too shy to meet in the middle. Someone who wants to be kissed… by me.

If I kiss her, I will know several things for sure. I’ve already taken shelter in her like a bird with a broken wing, she’s already laid food out for me like she does for the stray cats behind the apartment complex. And as any stray cat knows, an offering of food is not just the promise of a full belly but of a transformation. From something discarded, into something chosen. Is that what will happen to me?

If I kiss her, my parents will be disappointed. The church will be disappointed. They’ve all been waiting for me to wake up one day with long flowing hair and a sundress and a man and a baby; they’ve been expecting me to feel bad that I haven’t given them what they want. And if I kiss this girl on the dock, I will begin to undo that image, as though I were taking the stitches out of a hemmed garment, one by one, letting the bunched fabric finally fall free for the first time.

If I kiss her, I will move into her apartment and begin to learn her habits, learn the way she watches Forensic Files late at night to give concrete form to the anxieties that haunt her, learn the way that she often loves broken, wild things that when mended may fly away from her again, learn the way the salt air kisses her face when she’s freckled in August, dimpling as she smiles under her sun hat and the breeze carries her laughter down the beach.

And if I kiss her, I will learn something about me. It’s something I already know, but not something that I know how to say or even how to think. It’s something that has always been there, gnawing at my bones while I learned how to ignore the sound, focusing instead on the church organ at Sunday mass, hoping the incense would purify me of my blemishes and deformities, praying for a way to stop the light threatening to shine through, threatening to expose me.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I sit beside her on the dock and run the scenarios in my head, over and over and over again. I look into her eyes, wild with the dusk, seagulls drawing lazy circles overhead, and think about how strange it is to be so close to allowing myself the chance to tip over the edge of certainty and tumble into something completely unknown. Teetering at the edge, I stare at her lips, wondering how to will myself to the finish line, wondering how anyone ever knows anything.

I’m not from Alabama. Or even from the south. So everything is new. The spanish moss dripping from pecan trees like a kind of weeping willow, the vast expanse of sea and sky when you drive from the suburban sprawl of Daphne to the historic streets of Downtown Mobile, the battleship permanently docked and open for tours, the discarded mardi gras beads you can still find year round, tangled in tree branches, hidden in nooks and crannies and street alleys.

“New in town” means I still have some time before strangers will turn into acquaintances and then acquaintances will turn into friends. The first two are easier than the last one, because friends want to know you. And that’s a problem if friendship and belonging require you to have long flowing hair and a sundress and a man and a baby. Friends will notice when I fail to live up to this. Friends will want to know “what’s really going on” with me, but only if it won’t threaten anything about what they believe.

I could try to explain, but I don’t have the words.

This week’s episode begins with the recent New York Times essay by Matthew Vines, “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters,” but it quickly becomes something much more personal. Rather than debating labels for their own sake, I wanted to explore what the word queer has come to mean in my own life.

For me, queerness isn’t simply another word for LGBTQ. It’s a way of describing a life that exists beyond the expectations of what society assumes is “normal,” “natural,” or “default.” As a transgender man and a Catholic, I’ve spent much of my life navigating identities that many people insist cannot coexist. In that tension, I’ve discovered that queerness isn’t just about who we love or how we identify—it’s about refusing to let other people’s assumptions define who we are.

In this episode, I reflect on why I continue to embrace the word queer, how it has shaped my understanding of faith, and why I believe the Gospel — and Catholic Social Doctrine — has always made room for people whose lives don’t fit neatly into society’s categories. Whether or not you identify with the label yourself, I hope this conversation offers a deeper understanding of what queerness can mean—and why it has become such an important part of my own journey as a Catholic.

As always, thank you for listening.
Max

🎧 Listen to the podcast here on Substack (where you can toggle between video with subtitles and just the audio file, and read a transcript by clicking the button on the top of the episode page on the web), Spotify (which has video and in-app transcripts), Apple Podcasts (which has in-app transcripts), and YouTube.

On July 2, 2026, the Vatican formally declared the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) to be in schism after the movement consecrated four bishops in Écône, Switzerland without a papal mandate. The decree from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith marked the culmination of more than fifty years of increasingly strained relations between Rome and the traditionalist society founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970. While Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis each pursued different avenues toward reconciliation, the unauthorized episcopal consecrations represented, in the Vatican’s judgment, a definitive rupture in ecclesial communion.

Within hours, however, much of the online Catholic conversation had moved somewhere else entirely.

Rather than asking what schism is, why the consecration of bishops carries such profound ecclesiological significance, or why the Church treats communion with the pope as foundational to Catholic identity, many of the most widely shared discussions and memes revolved around a different question: If the SSPX can be declared schismatic, why isn’t someone like Fr. James Martin?

This comparison illustrates something critical about the personal identity of many Catholics today.

Over the past several decades, American political life has increasingly been described through the language of the “culture war.” The phrase was popularized by sociologist James Davison Hunter in his influential 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, where he argued that American public life was no longer characterized simply by disagreements over individual political issues, but by competing moral worldviews. These conflicts were not merely about abortion, sexuality, religion, or education as isolated debates. They reflected fundamentally different visions of what America had been, what it should become, and who had the authority to define its future.

Political rhetoric soon amplified this framework. Pat Buchanan’s widely publicized speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention declared that the United States was engaged in “a cultural war...for the soul of America,” helping transform Hunter’s sociological concept into one of the dominant narratives of American politics. Since then, researchers have argued that culture wars are sustained not simply by ideological differences, but by feedback loops between political leaders, media organizations, and, increasingly, social media, each reinforcing the perception that society is divided into opposing moral camps.

…Sounds a lot like this concept of pitting the SSPX vs LGBTQ rights!

Rather than first asking why the Church distinguishes schism from other forms of disagreement, many Catholics immediately compared the Vatican’s decision to figures they already associated with the opposite side of the Church’s internal culture wars. The assumption was that the Vatican had made an ideological judgment between conservatives and progressives.

So wait… what exactly is the Society of St. Pius X?

For context, the Society of Saint Pius X was founded in 1970 by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre during the turbulent years following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Vatican II introduced some of the most significant reforms in modern Catholic history, encouraging liturgical renewal, greater participation of the laity, ecumenical dialogue with other Christian communities, improved relations with Judaism and other religions, and a renewed engagement with the modern world.

For Lefebvre, however, these reforms were a dangerous challenge to his vision for the Church.

Although the SSPX is often publicly associated with the Traditional Latin Mass, its disagreements with Rome have always extended far beyond questions of liturgical preference. The society has consistently rejected significant theological developments associated with Vatican II, particularly the Council’s teachings on religious liberty (and the idea that salvation exists outside the Church), ecumenism, collegiality, and the Church’s relationship to contemporary society.

Over the following decades, the SSPX developed an extensive international network of seminaries, schools, chapels, retreat centers, and religious communities. In places such as St. Marys, Kansas, it fostered not merely an alternative liturgical practice but an entire parallel Catholic culture organized around the conviction that the post-conciliar Church had fundamentally departed from authentic Catholic tradition.

Relations between the Holy See and the SSPX have remained canonically complex for decades. The movement’s first major rupture occurred in 1988, when Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without the approval of Pope John Paul II, resulting in automatic excommunications and the apostolic letter Ecclesia Dei.

Pope Benedict XVI later lifted those personal excommunications in 2009 as part of an effort toward reconciliation, while Pope Francis extended certain pastoral faculties to SSPX priests during the Jubilee Year of Mercy and beyond. Yet these gestures never resolved the underlying ecclesiological disagreements concerning authority, Vatican II, and the governance of the Church.

The unauthorized episcopal consecrations carried out in Écône on June 30, 2026 ultimately marked the definitive collapse of those decades-long reconciliation efforts.

What is schism?

One consequence of contemporary Catholic discourse is that schism has increasingly become a rhetorical label applied to anyone perceived as departing from orthodoxy. Historically and canonically, however, the term has a much more precise meaning.

Schism does not simply refer to disagreement with Church teaching, public controversy, or even theological error. Rather, it concerns the rupture of ecclesial communion through the rejection of legitimate ecclesiastical authority.

As Jesuit theologian Fr. Thomas Rausch recently explained to NPR, schism occurs when someone has “broken communion with the Church” by rejecting the authority through which the Church is governed.

Catholic theology has long differentiated between personal sin, doctrinal error, heresy, disciplinary disobedience, and schism. These categories are neither interchangeable nor merely semantic. They reflect different kinds of relationships to the life and authority of the Church.

The unauthorized consecration of bishops occupies a uniquely significant place within this framework because bishops are not simply administrators. They stand within apostolic succession and exercise authority in communion with the Bishop of Rome. To consecrate bishops explicitly against papal authority is therefore not merely an act of disobedience; it establishes a competing structure of ecclesial authority.

Conclusion

The culture war mentality trains us to see every controversy as a contest between opposing camps. Every decision becomes a victory or defeat. Every statement is interpreted as support for one side or condemnation of the other. Before long, we begin to imagine that the Church exists primarily to declare winners and losers in our ideological battles.

It is true that the Church certainly has structures of authority. It has canon law, bishops, councils, and theological traditions that govern how it understands communion and how it orders its common life. Questions about schism belong to that reality. They concern the integrity of the Church’s sacramental and ecclesial communion.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus draws people to his table before they understand everything, before they agree on everything, and often before they have changed anything at all. His ministry consistently resists the temptation to sort people into camps worthy of belonging and camps beyond redemption. The Church’s canonical judgments about authority were never intended to become a substitute for that evangelical witness.

Perhaps, then, the deeper question raised by the SSPX schism is not simply whether the Vatican acted correctly, but why so many Catholics instinctively interpreted the decision through the logic of the culture war in the first place. Why have we become so accustomed to asking who is “winning” or “losing” that we struggle to recognize when the Church is asking an entirely different question?

The Church is at its best when it refuses to mirror the polarization of the societies in which it exists. It will always have difficult conversations about doctrine, authority, and communion. But those questions should never eclipse the Gospel’s equally persistent call to hospitality, mercy, and encounter.

Recovering that distinction may not only help us understand one of the most significant canonical decisions of recent years—it may also help us imagine a Catholicism that is less captive to the culture war and more faithful to the expansive welcome of Christ.

This week on Whiplash, Emma and I are unpacking one of the biggest Catholic news stories of the year: the Vatican’s declaration that the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) is in schism.

Almost immediately, the announcement sparked a familiar cycle online. Memes spread across Catholic social media. People began asking why the SSPX had been declared schismatic while other figures they disagreed with had not. Before long, the conversation had become another front in the Catholic culture war.

In this episode, we argue that those reactions reveal something important. Rather than asking how the Church itself understands schism, many people instinctively interpret events through political narratives about winners and losers, heroes and villains, or whose side the Vatican is supposedly taking. Those narratives can make for compelling social media posts, but they often obscure the theological, historical, and canonical questions that are actually at the heart of the story.

Emma shares how the SSPX developed, why Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s movement became increasingly separated from Rome, and what ultimately led to this moment. Along the way, we discuss the movement’s political history, its relationship to broader traditionalist and far-right currents, and why understanding that history matters if we want to make sense of the present.

The episode also explores a broader question: what happens when our understanding of the Church becomes shaped primarily by culture-war thinking? Once every controversy is reduced to a battle between ideological camps, it becomes much harder to recognize the distinctions the Church itself is trying to make. The result is a conversation driven more by outrage and comparison than by careful attention to history, theology, or canon law.

If this topic sounds familiar, it’s because Emma and I have written about the SSPX before. In June 2025, as part of our High Control Catholicism series, we examined the Society’s history and its community in St. Marys, Kansas, exploring how separatist religious environments can shape identity, authority, and daily life. If you’d like additional historical context alongside this week’s episode, I encourage you to revisit that article as well:

As always, thank you for listening, sharing the show, and supporting this work. Your support makes conversations like these possible.

Peace,
Max

🎧 Listen to the podcast here on Substack (where you can toggle between video with subtitles and just the audio file, and read a transcript by clicking the button on the top of the episode page on the web), Spotify (which has video and in-app transcripts), Apple Podcasts (which has in-app transcripts), and YouTube.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that states may ban transgender girls and women from participating on girls’ and women’s school sports teams, holding that Title IX allows schools to determine eligibility based on what the Court called “biological sex.”

I’ve seen many trans folks talking about this, like lawyer Chase Strangio, journalists like Imara Jones and Erin Reed, as well as trans athlete Chris Moiser. But something that stands out to me is how little I see cisgender people talking about it.

Now, this isn’t a callout. The supreme court also ruled on Birthright Citizenship, so understandably there’s rightfully been a lot of focus on that decision. But the lack of engagement on the ruling that affects trans folks tells us something important.

“Trans rights” has become a topic that is almost entirely about how people feel about trans people – not about the science, not about the experiences of actual trans people, and not about the real outcomes that follow from attacks on trans rights. Instead, the conversation is entirely about how people feel. How would you feel if there was a trans person in the bathroom with you? How would you feel about a trans person playing sports against you? How would you feel if you found out that someone you know had transitioned in the past?

This frigid atmosphere was certainly intentionally engendered by political rhetoric, where many Republicans targeted a small community that wasn’t particularly well-known or understood by the general public and then simply spread inflammatory lies far and wide. In this way, they dominated the conversation about transgender people and made it about their own weird gross claims rather than about anything inherently true to the lives and experiences of trans people.

It’s bizarre how clearly the “debate” about trans people is so entirely about cisgender people’s feelings.

Or is it?

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Transition is not something anyone approaches lightly. It’s not a whim nor a trend. For generations, trans people in the US have grown up isolated and alone, wondering if they were the only one like this, praying to God to change them. Today, transition is more known but also much more stigmatized and dangerous within a hostile legal climate. But no matter the time in history, transition has always required one major ingredient: self-knowledge.

When life hands you the default settings on gender and sexuality, you grow up with a set of assumptions. You assume that you will date, fall in love, get married, possibly have children, and that all of these activities will not only be approved of by society but actively celebrated. Your wedding day will be attended by all of your family and by your community of friends, maybe some co-workers, church folks, etc. Anyone you know (and want to invite!) will probably make every effort to be there. You can walk hand in hand with your new spouse down the street without any fear that the mere act of holding hands with the person you love could cause someone to want to harm you.

In short, you don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to think about it because not only does it match the expectations that other people have for you, it also matches the expectations that you have for yourself. And herein lies the difference: for people outside the default expectations of gender and sexuality, this picture looks very different. Gay people may deal with unaccepting family who refuse to attend their wedding. They may avoid holding their loved one’s hand in public due to safety concerns. Asexual people may grow up perfectly content without a partner but field unending questions about why they haven’t “found someone” yet. Transgender people may deal with rejection, employment discrimination, housing instability, and more.

When your life doesn’t match the default settings, it forces you to make a choice. Do you pretend to go along with what everyone else is expecting of you? Do you pretend to be someone you’re not? Or do you choose authenticity and face all the possible consequences? I can assure you, people don’t make this decision lightly. It’s not just social acceptance at stake but very real and serious safety issues. Statistically, trans people are more often the victims of some type of violence than the general cisgender population. And when you’ve been kicked out of your home and are viewed as a social pariah, it can also present obstacles to meeting basic survival needs.

Yet, people still pursue transition. And those people report mental health outcomes so positive that any rational society would celebrate finding such an effective and safe treatment. When scientists and researchers study transgender people, that’s what they keep finding: safe, effective treatments that lead to happier, well-adjusted people. And it’s the self-knowledge needed to get there that certainly provokes an intense reaction from the general public.

Maybe that’s why this debate has become so detached from transgender people’s actual lives. It’s easier to speculate about hypothetical threats than it is to listen to the people who have lived this reality. It’s easier to ask how cisgender people feel than to ask what transgender people have experienced.

The Supreme Court’s ruling will have real consequences for transgender youth. But it also reveals something that has been true for a long time: our culture has become remarkably comfortable discussing transgender people without ever centering transgender voices.

If we genuinely care about truth, fairness, or even good public policy, that has to change. The conversation cannot begin and end with other people’s fears or discomfort. It has to begin with the people whose lives are actually being debated. Before anyone decides what our rights should be, the least they can do is listen to us.

Lately I’ve been wrestling with the question, “what is missing from my understanding of the Black Catholic experience?”

Like many white Catholics, I grew up hearing that racism was wrong. I learned the basic language of equality and justice. But what I was not taught was the deeper history of race, Catholicism, and the Church’s own complicated relationship with racism.

I was not taught about the ways Catholics participated in and benefited from systems of slavery and segregation. I was not taught about the generations of Black Catholics who fought for belonging in a Church that often failed to fully recognize their dignity. I was not taught about the rich tradition of Black Catholic thought, spirituality, and theology that has shaped the Church.

This episode is an invitation to begin filling in those gaps.

I’m joined by Alessandra Harris for a conversation about why learning Black Catholic history not only fills in our view of the Church’s past but can also help us understand the present. We talk about the importance of listening to Black Catholic voices, confronting the parts of our history that are uncomfortable, and recognizing that the story of Catholicism in America has always been more complex than the versions many of us were handed.

The stories we tell about the past shape how we understand issues of justice today — from policing and incarceration to housing, education, and the ways communities experience belonging. Books like In the Shadow of Freedom have helped illuminate how historical systems continue to influence our society, and why honest historical reflection matters.

For many Catholics, especially white Catholics, learning Black Catholic history requires moving beyond a simple understanding of racism as individual prejudice and toward a deeper understanding of the systems, structures, and histories that have shaped our Church and our country.

Thank you to the historians, theologians, writers, and Black Catholic leaders whose work helped inform this conversation, including voices like Alessandra’s and Fr. Bryan Massingale, whose scholarship continues to challenge the Church to take seriously its call for justice and solidarity.

My hope is that this episode invites all of us — especially those of us who were never taught this history — to approach it with humility, curiosity, and a willingness to listen.

Because learning Black Catholic history is not separate from understanding Catholic history.

It is Catholic history.

-Max

🎧 Listen to the podcast here on Substack (where you can toggle between video with subtitles and just the audio file, and read a transcript by clicking the button on the top of the episode page on the web), Spotify (which has video and in-app transcripts), Apple Podcasts (which has in-app transcripts), and YouTube.

Fast forward to adulthood. After undergoing a painful rejection by the conservative Catholic community I had called home because of my transgender identity, I went through a process of what I call “deconstruction to reconstruction,” an evaluation of my beliefs about God, morality, queerness, and even salvation outside the Catholic Church. A central component of this process was totally letting go of those apologetics lessons and goals: my faith had finally become intensely personal. It was no longer a purely intellectual exercise that I viewed within a competitive framework, but over time became intimately connected to my physical, embodied experience in a way that transformed my understanding of spirituality and God’s grace.

Once my faith became grounded in my lived experience like this, everything changed. Now I could understand marginalization, not just theoretically but from direct experience. I started to see why so many Christians are keen to crucify Jesus and leave their understanding of him nailed to the cross, limp and impotent, rather than confront the radical and subversive example of his life. Jesus confronted rigid religious leaders trying to catch him breaking the rules. He did not treat society’s untouchables as charity cases for his healing power, but rather honored their human dignity and encountered them without an agenda beyond kindness and presence.

As my transition progressed and my faith deepened, I found a community made up of other LGBTQ Catholics and their allies. I learned from leading Catholic theologians and scholars. And I even met Pope Francis, telling him in Spanish that I’m transgender. Throughout all of this, I started to realize that the Catholicism I had grown up in was… incomplete. If there were Catholics who could accept and love me as a transgender man, if even the Pope was able to accept me… then what was going on with the Catholicism I grew up in?

Three Lessons

Lesson One: Assimilation

American Catholics learned (at least) three lessons from their Protestant environment. First, how to assimilate: how to prove they belonged in a culture that often did not want them. Second, how to pursue respectability and institutional influence, especially once belonging finally became possible. And third, how to translate religious beliefs into culture-war positions, where moral authority is measured in terms of political power.

But in doing so, American Catholicism also missed something important. Protestantism, for all its fractures, has often been more successful at two things Catholics have struggled with: building cross-denominational coalitions and experimenting theologically at the edges of its own traditions. Those are the overlooked possibilities in this story.

For much of American history, Catholics weren’t the fan favorites. Colonial and early national Protestantism often defined Catholicism as a political threat—foreign, authoritarian, and incompatible with democratic self-rule because of its loyalty to the Pope. As Irish and other Catholic immigrants arrived in the nineteenth century, these suspicions merged with anti-immigrant sentiment. In response, Catholics understandably pursued acceptance: they built institutions, demonstrated patriotism, and worked to prove they belonged.

But that belonging came at a cost. Again and again, Catholics learned to assimilate. Black Catholics, for example, were frequently marginalized as white Catholics advanced within the racial and cultural hierarchies of American life. Respectability often outweighed justice, and instead of offering a sustained critique of dominant American norms, Catholic communities frequently adapted themselves to them.

Lesson Two: Respectability & Influence

By the mid-twentieth century, this strategy appeared successful. Catholics had entered the American mainstream. Yet with that success came deeper absorption into American cultural assumptions. The rise of the Religious Right accelerated the shift. Alliances between conservative Catholics and evangelicals—developed through figures like Phyllis Schlafly and later consolidated in the Moral Majority—encouraged a vision of Christianity increasingly defined by political struggle. Faith became less a form of moral witness than a vehicle for cultural and electoral power.

Lesson Three: Culture-War Christianity

The effects are visible today. Many Catholic influencers now operate within media ecosystems developed by evangelical megachurch culture: building personal brands, monetizing outrage, and connecting with audiences through constant conflict and crisis. It’s a world of culture-war logic, partisan polarization, and the assumption that political victory is the primary measure of religious success — that Catholics have now been sucked into.

Yet, there are good things about Protestant traditions that Catholics haven’t explored. Protestants have often proven unusually effective at building cross-denominational coalitions around shared moral concerns, from civil rights activism to community organizing and responses within LGBT interfaith circles to crises like AIDs. Likewise, Protestant decentralization has created space for theological experimentation, allowing movements such as Black theology, feminist theology, and queer theology to develop in ways that are often harder within Catholic structures.

Learning from these Protestant possibilities does not require abandoning Catholic authority or tradition. It does suggest that Catholics might rediscover openness within their own tradition. The ongoing debates around synodality point to an ongoing tension here: many who have embraced culture-war forms of engagement remain wary of the participatory ecclesiology the Church itself which Pope Francis and now Pope Leo is attempting to foster.

Conclusion

The story of American Catholicism, then, is not simply a story of resisting Protestant influence. It is a story of selective assimilation. In seeking acceptance within a Protestant nation, Catholics often absorbed habits of exclusion, respectability, and political power while neglecting traditions of solidarity, experimentation, and encounter.

But perhaps the deeper lesson is that faith cannot survive if it is only apologetics and culture wars. It has to be something personal. Something that we live.

I began this essay as the child who wanted to win arguments on the playground. I thought faith was proven by having the right answers, by being able to explain why my tradition was correct and everyone else was mistaken. But life has a way of disrupting the arguments we build. It asks questions that rhetorical debates alone cannot answer. And it asks us to use our moral imagination in ways that defy apologetics.

My own journey through rejection, transition, and reconstruction taught me that the Catholic tradition was larger than the version I inherited. The Church I thought was defined by rigid boundaries became a place where I discovered unexpected belonging as an “outcast.” And the people I once viewed as “wrong,” as apologetics opponents, became peers, teachers, and friends.

Maybe American Catholicism’s future depends on learning this same lesson. Not by abandoning tradition, but by allowing tradition to encounter the people it has sometimes pushed to the margins. Not by winning more arguments, but by becoming more capable of listening. Not by measuring faith through influence and power, but through whether it reflects the radical love of the person at its center.

Because the Jesus I’ve walked with is never concerned with winning. He’s concerned with loving.

A big question I’ve been wrestling with is, what is missing from my understanding of the Black Catholic experience?

Like many white Catholics, I grew up hearing that racism is wrong. What I was not taught in any meaningful way was the history of Catholic involvement in slavery, the development of Black Catholic thought, or the ways Black Catholics have challenged the Church to live more fully into its own teachings on justice and human dignity.

In this episode, I reflect on what I’ve been learning from Black Catholic journalists, (featured by the Black Catholic Messenger), historians, and theologians, including Alessandra Harris, Fr. Bryan Massingale, and James H. Cone. Together, their work raises important questions about how we understand racism, history, and the role of the Church in American life.

But, it’s important to note that this episode does not feature any Black Catholic guests directly. My next episode will feature a Black Catholic guest and I will continue to invite more in the future. My goal here is not to speak for Black Catholics or offer a definitive account of Black Catholic history by any means. Rather, this episode is an attempt to make my own learning process visible—to share some of the questions I’ve been wrestling with, what I’ve discovered along the way, and where I think that learning points.

If you’ve ever wondered what the Church’s history with slavery is, why so many conversations about racism feel incomplete, or why Black Catholic thinkers haven’t had the chance to teach the wider Church, I hope you’ll give it a listen.

As always, thank you for joining me on the journey.

– Max

But if we take this devotion seriously, what does it actually ask of us?

The Sacred Heart is not a symbol detached from human suffering. It is the heart of Christ, who consistently moved toward those on the margins — the rejected, the excluded, and those whose dignity was denied.

In my latest column for the National Catholic Reporter, I reflect on why devotion to the Sacred Heart requires solidarity with LGBTQ people, and why queer and trans Catholics are not outside the Body of Christ, but deeply woven into it.

Read the full piece here: “Dear bishops: Devotion to Sacred Heart requires solidarity with LGBTQ community.”

This week on Whiplash, Emma joins me to dig into Fr. Mike Schmitz and Kim Zember’s recent video for EWTN, “Can You Be Gay and Catholic?” At first glance, the conversation sounds compassionate. Again and again, listeners are told that God loves them, created them intentionally, and desires a relationship with them.

But as we listened, we found ourselves asking a deeper question: what kind of God is actually being presented?

Every affirmation comes with a qualification. God loves you—but don’t trust your desires. God created you—but your understanding of yourself may be fundamentally mistaken. God wants you—but you may not even know the depth of your own sinfulness. The result is a spirituality that can leave people constantly second-guessing themselves, searching for hidden faults, and wondering whether they can ever truly rest in God’s love.

For Emma, the conversation brought back painful memories of purity culture and scrupulosity. For me, it raised questions about the image of God that so many LGBTQ Catholics have inherited. Is God primarily a judge watching for mistakes, or is God revealed through the life of Jesus—the Jesus who consistently moved toward people on the margins, restored dignity, and invited people into deeper relationship?

We also explore how much of the video’s language comes not from Catholic traditions of human dignity and Catholic Social Teaching, but from an evangelical testimony framework that centers “overcoming brokenness.” What happens when homosexuality becomes the obstacle that gives a conversion story its meaning? And what are the spiritual consequences when a person’s humanity is treated primarily as a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be integrated into a life of discipleship?

Finally, we discuss Fr. Mike’s claim that Catholics cannot attend same-sex weddings, the absence of any supporting evidence or citations from Church teaching for that claim, and the reality that the Catholic Church now permits pastoral blessings for same-sex couples.

At its heart, this episode isn’t really about weddings. It’s about human dignity and whether the theology we offer LGBTQ people actually sounds like good news.

Thanks for listening,
Max

🎧 Listen to the podcast here on Substack (where you can toggle between video with subtitles and just the audio file, and read a transcript by clicking the button on the top of the episode page on the web), Spotify (which has video and in-app transcripts), Apple Podcasts (which has in-app transcripts), and YouTube.

At first glance, the idea that Pride is a kind of theology appears intentionally provocative. For many Christians, the word “pride” evokes one of the seven deadly sins, with Pride Month understood as a political or cultural phenomenon that they have to “take back” for the Sacred Heart. But these assumptions fail to recognize the origin of Pride as a response to oppression, and the way that Pride functions within moral conversations about human dignity, solidarity, and liberation theology.

The relationship between queer communities and religious institutions is undoubtedly fraught. Many churches are sites of exclusion or conditional “welcome.” There are even ongoing debates on social media this June about whether or not churches should participate in Pride events at all in light of the religious trauma many LGBTQ people carry, especially if those churches fail to offer meaningful support or inclusion to LGBTQ people outside of Pride month.

The language of Pride itself did not emerge as a celebration of superiority or self-glorification. Rather, it emerged as a response to centuries of shame, marginalization, and exclusion directed at lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other queer people. In the years following the Stonewall riots in 1969, activist and organizer Craig Rodwell helped popularize the language of “gay pride” because he believed that LGBTQ people needed language that directly challenged the shame imposed upon them by society.

Shame, in this context, is not simply a painful emotion but a deeply destabilizing force that can shape the whole of one’s sense of self; communicating not merely that something is wrong, but that we are wrong, unworthy, or fundamentally unacceptable. Because shame works by fragmenting identity and severing connection, its opposite is not reducible to a single feeling like confidence or self-esteem, but is better understood as a constellation of restored human capacities: dignity, recognition, integration, and the freedom to desire and to be seen authentically.

Celebrating Pride, then, is not intended to signify arrogance but human dignity and the conviction that queer and transgender people need not apologize for their existence.

This argument comes into dialogue with Catholicism specifically in light of Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. One of the encyclical’s central contributions is its insistence that Catholic Social Doctrine is not a static collection of propositions but a living tradition that develops through engagement with new historical realities. (I unpacked the Pope’s new encyclical in a detailed essay last week if you want to know more about it).

Human dignity remains constant, but the Church’s understanding of the conditions necessary for human flourishing has deepened (and indeed, changed) over time through encounters with new forms of marginalization, exclusion, and social transformation. The development of Catholic Social Teaching concerning labor, migration, economics, ecology, and technology demonstrates this pattern. New historical circumstances raise new moral questions, requiring fresh reflection on what human dignity demands in practice.

Viewed through this lens, Pride can be understood as a social movement that has generated its own moral and theological insights concerning human dignity. Its history is rooted in experiences of exclusion that exposed the limitations of prevailing social and religious assumptions, which echoes Jesus’s identification with “the least of these” (Mt 25), where divine presence is revealed among those pushed to the margins. In this sense, Pride also resonates with liberation theology’s insistence that theology begins from the lived reality of the oppressed. This starting point also informs feminist theology, disability theology, and other theologies that expand and deepen liberationist approaches to the question of what it means to be fully human before God.

The History of Pride

The origins of Pride are commonly traced to the Stonewall uprising of June 1969. At the time, LGBTQ people throughout the United States faced widespread discrimination, criminalization, police harassment, and social stigma. Specifically, anti-cross-dressing laws in many cities authorized arrests simply for violating conventional expectations of gender presentation. Gay bars and gathering places were frequently raided by police. Employment protections were virtually nonexistent, and public disclosure of one’s sexuality or gender identity often carried severe personal consequences.

The communities most vulnerable to these systems of control were frequently those who occupied multiple forms of marginalization at once: transgender people, drag queens, gender-nonconforming people, homeless queer youth, sex workers, and poor LGBTQ individuals. When police raided the Stonewall Inn, resistance emerged directly from the most marginalized group, in particular figures like transgender woman Marsha P. Johnson. The significance of Stonewall lies not merely in the fact that people fought back against police violence. Rather, it marked a broader rejection of a social order that required LGBTQ people to survive through invisibility, silence, and shame.

The subsequent emergence of Gay Liberation reflected this shift. Earlier homophile movements had often sought social acceptance by emphasizing the similarities between homosexual and heterosexual people. Gay Liberation, by contrast, increasingly embraced visibility, solidarity, and collective struggle. The language of Pride emerged within this context as a direct challenge to shame.

This historical context is important because it reveals that Pride’s central claim was fundamentally anthropological and moral rather than merely political. Pride asserted that LGBTQ people possess an inherent dignity that does not depend upon social approval. Such a claim resonates deeply with the core principles of Catholic Social Doctrine. While activists and theologians may disagree about particular ethical questions, the underlying assertion is consistent: every human being possesses a dignity that cannot be reduced to social utility, legal status, conformity, or public respectability.

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Storytelling and Memory at Pride

Yet Pride does more than affirm dignity. It also functions as a practice of collective memory. Each year, Pride celebrations return participants to the stories, struggles, losses, and victories that shaped the movement. Stonewall occupies a central place within this memory, but it exists alongside remembrance of the AIDS crisis, anti-LGBTQ violence, grassroots organizing efforts, and generations of individuals whose lives have often been omitted from dominant historical narratives. In this sense, Pride performs a function analogous to many religious traditions. It preserves communal memory through ritualized acts of remembrance that shape collective identity across generations.

Note: For more stories at the intersection of LGBTQ and Catholic experience, check out Emma Cieslik’s Queer Catholic Oral History Project, available on Substack.

This dimension of memory is particularly significant because it challenges narratives that treat social progress as inevitable. Pride insists that dignity has often been secured through struggle and sacrifice. The annual return to these histories serves not only commemorative purposes but also moral ones. It reminds participants that justice remains unfinished and that solidarity with vulnerable communities remains necessary.

The history of Pride also demonstrates another principle emphasized throughout Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas: moral development frequently occurs through encounter with those at the margins. The LGBTQ movement has repeatedly been challenged by individuals whose experiences exposed exclusions within the movement itself. Lesbian activists challenged sexism. Transgender activists such as Sylvia Rivera criticized efforts to sacrifice the most vulnerable members of the community in pursuit of broader social acceptance. Debates over race, class, disability, and economic justice have similarly expanded the movement’s understanding of liberation.

This pattern mirrors broader dynamics within Catholic Social Doctrine. The development of moral tradition often occurs when previously marginalized voices reveal dimensions of human dignity that dominant groups have overlooked. Theological growth requires attentiveness to realities that existing frameworks fail to address adequately.

Trans Experience and Human Becoming

Transgender experience offers a particularly important example. Contemporary debates frequently treat transgender people as though they occupy a peripheral place within LGBTQ history. Historically, however, transgender and gender-nonconforming people were central participants in the struggles that gave rise to Pride itself. Their significance extends beyond historical participation. Transgender experience raises fundamental questions about embodiment, identity, freedom, and human flourishing that contemporary societies continue to wrestle with.

Note: I have written frequently on the theme of transgender embodiment, for example in this piece about the Way of the Cross for my column at the National Catholic Reporter.

For this reason, the disproportionate attention directed toward transgender people today cannot be understood solely in political terms. At a deeper level, trans existence challenges assumptions that many societies have treated as fixed and unquestionable. As civil rights attorney and transgender man Chase Strangio has argued, trans people demonstrate the possibility of living beyond inherited certainties and rigid social categories. Whether one agrees with every aspect of contemporary gender theory or not, it is difficult to deny that transgender lives force broader society to confront questions about autonomy, embodiment, and the nature of human becoming.

A New Thing

Here theological reflection becomes unavoidable. The prophet Isaiah records God’s declaration: “I am about to do a new thing.” Within its original context, the passage speaks of divine transformation emerging where none seemed possible. The image of rivers in the desert and pathways through the wilderness suggests a God whose creative activity continually exceeds human expectations.

Many transgender people have found profound resonance in this imagery, such as non-binary speaker Alok Vaid-Menon who gave a sermon on this very theme. Transness bears witness to the reality of transformation. Human beings are not static. Communities are not static. History is not static. The possibility of becoming more fully ourselves — and creating more just forms of social life together — lies at the heart of both liberation movements and many religious traditions.

This is ultimately why Pride remains such a powerful and contested phenomenon. Pride is a public assertion that human dignity exists where society has often denied it. It is also a ritual of memory that preserves histories of struggle and survival. It is a tradition that continually expands through engagement with marginalized voices. And it is a practice of hope rooted in the conviction that human beings and human societies are capable of transformation.

In this sense, Pride operates as a lived theology of human dignity. Its central claim is not that LGBTQ people are superior to others, nor that human fulfillment is found in self-assertion alone. Rather, its claim is that every person possesses an inherent worth that cannot be erased by stigma, exclusion, or shame. And such a conviction stands remarkably close to the heart of Catholic Social Doctrine itself.

If Magnifica Humanitas is correct that traditions deepen through encounter with new realities, then Pride should not be dismissed merely as a social phenomenon external to theological reflection. It should also be recognized as a site where questions of dignity, liberation, community, and human flourishing continue to be worked out in public.

Whatever conclusions one ultimately reaches, that work is unmistakably theological.

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As Pride Month continues, I’ve been reflecting on what Pride means to me as a transgender person. Too often, transgender people are treated as an afterthought in conversations about LGBTQ history, but there is no Pride without the T. Pride traces its roots to the Stonewall uprising, where transgender people, drag queens, and gender-nonconforming people helped spark a movement for liberation that rejected shame and demanded freedom.

In this episode, I explore what Pride means to me, touching on the history of Pride, the legacy of Gay Liberation, the importance of trans people to that story, and why transness continues to matter today. Trans people are not simply fighting for our own survival—we are witnesses to the possibility of transformation itself. As the prophet Isaiah writes, “I am about to do a new thing.” In a world determined to place people into rigid boxes, trans people remind us that another future is possible.

Happy Pride,
Max

🎧 Listen to the podcast here on Substack (where you can toggle between video with subtitles and just the audio file, and read a transcript by clicking the button on the top of the episode page on the web), Spotify (which has video and in-app transcripts), Apple Podcasts (which has in-app transcripts), and YouTube.

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But I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the encyclical also contains a robust history and solid articulation of the Church’s Social Doctrine. Why is that important? Because these key principles, also known as Catholic Social Teaching (CST), are a really big deal for the Church.

And you don’t have to take my word for it. Even the staunchly conservative United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (or USCCB) calls CST “a rich treasure of wisdom about building a just society and living lives of holiness amidst the challenges of modern society.” CST is a great backdrop for discussing the rise of a new technology that impacts everyone’s lives — whether you are personally using it or not.

Magnifica Humanitas is almost 40,000 words (let’s be real, that’s basically a short novel) and made up of five chapters. Although an encyclical is not considered infallible teaching, it does represent the Pope’s high-level, everyday teaching authority, which is also known as the ordinary magisterium. So it’s pretty important to Catholics. This encyclical also got a very high-profile and unusual rollout as well, with Pope Leo personally presenting it to the world (making history as the first Pope to personally introduce an encyclical) and, in another historic first, including the co-founder of an AI company called Anthropic, Chris Olah.

The first two chapters cover what the Pope specifically refers to as Catholic Social Doctrine, a language shift that appropriately elevates this above just “teaching.” Writing for The National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters (who I certainly don’t always agree with) comments (emphasis mine), “This is a welcome development, a reminder that this body of ideas are not optional, add-ons, nor are they merely ethical. They are at root doctrinal, rooted in Christian concepts about creation, sin, the incarnation, the Paschal mystery and the eschatological destiny of the human person.” Well said.

Chapter Three of the encyclical is where Leo zeroes in to make his arguments about artificial intelligence and how careful discernment is critical to ensure an approach to this technology that centers human dignity, while Chapter Four includes a historic apology for the Church’s role in perpetuating slavery. Finally, Chapter Five talks directly about war in the digital age, calling out just-war theory in particular as “outdated.” I just know JD Vance must be squirming.

The central importance of Catholic Social Doctrine in this letter is a positive development, even as the Catholic Church continues to lag on a number of actual social issues (including the LGBTQ community — and transgender people in particular). This article aims to explore what this development means in light of this tension.

The Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teaching

At this point you might be thinking, what are the seven elements of Catholic Social Teaching again? Per the USCCB, they are as follows: 1). Life and Dignity of the Human Person, 2). Call to Family, Community, and Participation, 3). Rights and Responsibilities, 4). Option for the Poor and Vulnerable, 5). The Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers, 6). Solidarity, and 7). Care for God’s Creation. In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo spends significant time in Chapter Two on all of these.

But before he gets there, he takes the time in Chapter One to do something very Catholic – laying out the lineage of this tradition and establishing the role of various prior Popes within that lineage. Again, this is important because Catholicism is a very scholarly religion (and yes, very male) and is all about being able to articulate the historical development of its theology (in this case, all of the men who have spoken about something before).

Magnifica Humantias mentions Leo XIII (the current Leo’s namesake) confronting the Industrial Revolution in Rerum Novarum 135 years ago; Pius XI expanding Catholic social thought during economic collapse and the rise of fascism; Pius XII addressing democracy, war, and human rights after World War II; John XXIII bringing a global focus to peace and human dignity; Paul VI connecting justice and development; John Paul II critiquing globalization, labor exploitation, and structures of sin; Benedict XVI examining economics, inequality, and globalization through the lens of charity and truth; and finally, Francis emphasizing synodality, ecology, migration, and fraternity. Then Leo XIV extends that tradition into the present age of artificial intelligence, digital power, and technological dehumanization.

With that history established, Chapter Two develops the seven themes of Catholic Social Doctrine by grounding human dignity in the belief that every person is created in the image of the Triune God. Every person possesses inalienable worth that cannot be reduced to productivity, wealth, or social status. Leo emphasizes the call to family (the straight nuclear family), community, and participation through his focus on communion, synodality, civic engagement, and shared responsibility in both society and the Church.

He strongly reinforces the Church’s preferential option for the poor and vulnerable through sustained attention to migrants, refugees, marginalized communities, and those harmed by economic inequality, environmental destruction, and technological exploitation (this is probably one of the parts that gets him labeled “the woke pope” and is consistent with various public statements he’s made).

Leo also emphasizes the dignity of work, insisting that labor is central to human flourishing and warning against economic and technological systems that reduce workers to disposable tools in service of profit and efficiency.

He describes solidarity as both a social principle and a personal virtue rooted in humanity’s interconnectedness, calling individuals, nations, and institutions to mutual care, shared sacrifice, and responsibility for future generations. He further expands care for creation by referencing Francis and his encyclical Laudato Si’, as well as using the language of integral ecology, linking environmental stewardship to economic justice, technological ethics, and concern for the poor.

Leo also, of course, develops points on artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, algorithmic discrimination, the concentration of data and technological power, synodality and accountability within the Church, apologizes for historical harm, and comments on ethical governance in the digital revolution.

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Why is this a big deal?

Catholicism is not a loose collection of personal opinions or local churches doing their own thing. It is a global institution with a defined teaching authority and a single leader in communion with Bishops around the world. That means when the Pope issues an encyclical, he is not just weighing in on current events, he’s helping shape how 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide are encouraged to understand the moral obligations of public life, economics, labor, technology, migration, ecology, and human dignity itself.

This matters especially in the United States, where Catholic Social Teaching is often overshadowed by culture war politics or reduced to a handful of issues detached from the broader tradition. Christianity in America has historically been shaped more by Protestant individualism and a suspicion toward centralized authority (which has in turn has paved the way for Christian Nationalism to flourish*). Catholicism is fundamentally global. Its social doctrine is not written only for American Catholics, European Catholics, or any single nation, but for the whole human family. Pope Leo emphasizes this notion in Magnifica Humanitas.

*Note: there are some American Catholics who do practice a kind of Catholic Nationalism. You can read some of my thoughts (with co-writer Emma Cieslik) on that here.

In paragraph 201, Leo warns that weakened international cooperation and an overreliance on market-driven globalization have produced “fundamentalist, identity-based and nationalistic reactions,” (emphasis mine), resulting not in authentic unity but in “a disorderly and conflict-ridden multipolarism with a prevailing sense of mistrust.” The Chicago-born Leo makes this critique at a moment when American nationalism and identity politics have a powerful grip on public life.

Some Catholics have been drawn to the Church precisely because they imagine it as totally fixed and unchanging — a fortress against modernity where doctrine simply drops from heaven, untouched by history or development. With this encyclical, Pope Leo pushes directly against that romanticized narrative. He repeatedly shows that Catholic Social Doctrine has developed through discernment across generations, with prior Popes responding to the crises of their own eras. And critically, Leo shows that the Church has been wrong — in his apology for the Church’s role in slavery and in calling just-war theory “outdated.”

Magnifica Humanitas illustrates that the Church is not frozen in time, but is rather meant to be a living tradition that wrestles seriously with the modern world while remaining rooted in the essential life and example of Jesus in the Gospel. Of course there’s still a long, long way to go, but this is an important moment.

At the Edges of Social Doctrine

Magnifica Humanitas did not invent the Church’s concern for the poor and marginalized, but the way it highlights that tradition does bring into sharper focus work that has long been developing at the edges of Catholic life and thought.

Across the global Church, there are already rich traditions — liberation theology, Black theology, womanist and feminist theology, queer theology, disability theology, and others — that have been reading the Gospel through the lived realities of poverty, racial injustice, gendered violence, ecological crisis, and exclusion. These movements have often done their work in local communities and grassroots settings, shaping pastoral practice and theological reflection in ways that often move ahead of formal magisterial articulation.

This encyclical does not create a new language for Catholic Social Doctrine, but does apply that Doctrine in a new and important way to artificial intelligence. Chapter Two, in particular, is where Leo most deliberately gathers and organizes the tradition, extending it into questions of algorithmic power, data concentration, surveillance, and technological impact on human life. In doing so, Leo is attempting to translate long-standing theological commitments into a new terrain that has not yet been fully metabolized by Catholic teaching.

In many ways, this is what these other rich theological traditions are also attempting to do: bring their insights into dialogue with the institutional church. The encyclical draws more explicitly into its orbit questions that edge traditions and theologies have long been wrestling with in embodied and context-specific ways. Like what it means to affirm dignity under conditions of structural inequality, how power operates through systems rather than only through individuals, and how communities resist forms of exclusion that are economic, political, cultural, and now increasingly technological.

Leo’s articulation gathers these questions more directly into the Church’s formal teaching vocabulary. The preferential option for the poor, concern for structural injustice, and attention to those excluded by economic and technological systems are not new in substance, but here they are more clearly named and integrated into the Church’s doctrinal center of gravity.

Much of the theological work at the margins begins from below, in lived struggle and local discernment, while Catholic Social Doctrine is articulated from “above,” atop a hierarchical centralized teaching office that speaks to the global Church. Magnifica Humanitas does not erase the inherent tension of edge vs center, but it does strengthen the lines of connection between them — like a kind of bridge.

How this changes the Church remains to be seen, but what is already clear is that Magnifica Humanitas doesn’t simply restate Catholic Social Doctrine for a new moment but widens both its vocabulary and reach. It’s definitely not perfect, and it doesn’t fix all the historic harms (even with an apology), but it does make the Church’s Social Teaching feel more like the living tradition that it is, able to speak with a fresh urgency in a world being reshaped by technologies that are only just beginning to be understood.

May the connections this encyclical builds to traditions long pushed to the edges of Catholic life prove fruitful, transformative, and impossible to ignore.

Want to read more about queer liberation theology from a Catholic perspective? Check out my article in The National Catholic Reporter, “Queer theology can help church recover Gospel roots.”

You can also read my article in Sojourners, “Catholics Can Do Queer Liberation Theology, Too.”

Finally, I made a podcast episode on Magnifica Humanitas that you can check out as well: “If You Didn’t Read the Pope’s Encyclical, Here’s What You Missed.”

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In this episode, we’re walking through Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, starting with an overview of the five chapters it contains and then delving into my thoughts on what this letter means from a queer liberation theology perspective.

On the surface, the document is a major development in Catholic Social Doctrine. It takes on artificial intelligence, labor, surveillance, global inequality, and modern warfare with a pretty direct moral framework centered on human dignity.

But much of what feels “new” here has actually been lived, named, and theorized for a long time, especially in liberation theology, queer theology, disability theology, and other traditions that have existed at the margins of the Church. And I can’t really separate my reading from my own experience here. As a transgender man, I know what it’s like to watch institutions fail to catch up to realities that people like me have already been living for years… sometimes in survival mode, sometimes in theological reflection, always without guaranteed recognition.

So there’s this strange double feeling throughout the encyclical. On one hand, something is clearly shifting. On the other hand, entire communities of people have already been thinking through these questions long before they became “official” concerns.

And that’s really what this episode is about from my perspective: holding the tension of a letter that makes real progress for an institution that has lagged behind developments in the field.

As always thanks for listening, and I would love to know your thoughts about this encyclical in the comments.

Warmly,
Max

🎧 Listen to the podcast here on Substack (where you can toggle between video with subtitles and just the audio file, and read a transcript by clicking the button on the top of the episode page on the web), Spotify (which has video and in-app transcripts), Apple Podcasts (which has in-app transcripts), and YouTube.

It’s been raining a lot in Ohio, and the honeysuckle are in bloom with perfume on the air, and I’ve added additional bird feeders into our yard. I’ve always wanted to know more about the birds in the region where I live (we’re neighbors, after all), and now with daily visitors right in front of our kitchen window, I’ve started to learn their names — house finch, song sparrow, cowbird, grackle.

Learning the names of birds feels like a small way to divest from the social media feed. I recently finished reading Enough is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology by Matthew Bernico and Dean Dettloff along with cracking open Mutual Aid by Dean Spade, so I’ve been deeply immersed in questions about the systems in which we live.

There’s a meme about systems; it’s a cartoon panel of a medieval peasant carrying a bushel of sticks on their back with the speech bubble, “We should improve society somewhat.” Next to the peasant, a man pops out of a nearby well with a cheeky grin and says, “Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent.”

This is one of the core issues at the heart of capitalism. We suffer from its excesses, yet we are also forced to participate in it. Capitalism, as Bernico and Dettloff argue, is constructed around the fantasy of infinite growth. Growth is the goal, growth by any means necessary.

The problem is our finite planet.

You may know that I live on a hobby farm. We have horses, a mini donkey, chickens, rabbits, lots of neighborhood barn cats, and three dogs. There’s lots of space to think out here, and plenty of opportunities to get your hands and feet muddy. I can jump on my bike and go thirty or forty miles largely on gravel roads. It’s beautiful, and I’m grateful for it every day, even when my paycheck barely stretches enough for rising grocery prices and gas to also cover horse feed. There is a peace, beauty, and simplicity to my life that is profoundly calming and stabilizing.

The peace I enjoy here helps give me the bandwidth to think outside the box. I’ve been able to explore liberation theology, question the mechanisms of capitalism, and ask what a healthy community sustained by the mutual aid efforts of the members would actually look like. I’ve had the time, focus, and interest to read what Pope Francis wrote about the poor and the environment in Laudato Si’, his second encyclical, on care for the earth. There is power in the way he centers the people most impacted by systemic oppression, though he wasn’t a perfect advocate for the marginalized—he understood the basics, like in his fourth and final encyclical, Delixi Nos (He loved us) when he points back to Matthew 25:40 and “the least of these.”

It’s not just “kindness” or “charity towards the less fortunate” that is being asked of us. Pope Francis famously met with transgender women in Rome who were sex workers — stereotypical “sinners,” the type of people you’re “supposed” to minister to (like Sister Luisa said in our recent podcast conversation). But pastoral ministry includes everyone, and it meets people precisely where they are, respecting their identity and language, refusing to impose a top-down “Western civilization” perspective. Our lives as Americans are a colonial project, continued in the construction of massive data centers around the country that drain both human drinking water and the energy from grids that citizens rely on to heat their homes and cook their food, while the intangible AI bubble continues to dangerously swell the unstable economy.

Infinite growth. Finite planet.

So what does it mean to step out of sync? To reject “business as usual?”

I think it means finding your own thing. You know, that thing you do that doesn’t seem like much but always brings a smile to your face. Like when do a favor for your elderly neighbor. Or when you chat with the cashier at the grocery store. When you share the little you have with another. When you give someone a ride while their car is in the shop. Sometimes it’s doing something for another person, and sometimes it’s receiving help.

We are all tangled up together in this thing called life.

And these small actions that seem like nothing (and that you can’t post on social media) are really, truly what make the world go around.

Thanks for being here. I’ll see you next week.

This week, I’m joined by Dr. Ish Ruiz for an episode where we explore not only Ish’s own journey as a queer Catholic theologian from Puerto Rico, but also the deeper questions at the heart of queer theology itself: What does it mean to “queer” theology? What happens when we approach scripture, doctrine, and tradition from the margins rather than the center? And how might queer theology help us imagine a more liberatory, expansive understanding of God and the Church?

Dr. Ish Ruiz is an assistant professor of Latinx and Queer Decolonial Theology at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, where his work focuses on the intersections of queer theology, Catholicism, Latinx theology, sexual ethics, liberation, and ecclesiology. Over the years, Ish has become an important voice in conversations surrounding LGBTQ inclusion in the Church, Catholic education, and the spiritual dignity of queer people. His work is deeply rooted in both scholarship and ministry, shaped by over a decade of accompanying LGBTQ Catholics in schools, parishes, and pastoral spaces.

In this conversation, we discuss how queer theology does far more than simply advocate for LGBTQ inclusion or engage in LGBTQ apologetics. Queer theology “queers” theology by using the term queer as a verb: disrupting, inverting, and dismantling rigid or heteronormative interpretations of Christian doctrine. We talk about what it means to look at the world from a perspective on the margins (a queer perspective) rather than centralizing the magisterium.

We also talk about Ish’s theological vision for the church and the pastoral importance of reminding LGBTQ people that they are already beloved by God. Drawing from his work in ministry and ethics, Ish reflects on the ways queer Catholics have often been taught to forget their own goodness — and how theology can become a tool for healing, dignity, and liberation instead of shame.

During the episode, we also discuss Ish’s two recent books:

• LGBTQ+ Educators in Catholic Schools: Embracing Inclusivity, Synodality, and Justice

• Cornerstones: Sacred Stories of LGBTQ+ Employees in Catholic Institutions (co-edited volume of LGTBQ stories from New Ways Ministry)

Both books are important contributions to contemporary Catholic conversations around LGBTQ inclusion, labor, education, and justice.

If you’d like to learn more about Dr. Ish Ruiz, his scholarship, and his ongoing work in queer and Latinx theology, you can visit his website for more information.

As always, thank you for listening, supporting, and helping build these conversations together. I’m incredibly grateful to continue creating spaces where queer theology, Catholicism, liberation, and faith can meet honestly and expansively.

With gratitude,
Max

🎧 Listen to the podcast here on Substack (where you can toggle between video with subtitles and just the audio file, and read a transcript by clicking the button on the top of the episode page on the web), Spotify (which has video and in-app transcripts), Apple Podcasts(which has in-app transcripts), and YouTube.

Most of us already know what it feels like to have someone else tell our story–or worse yet to have our story overlooked. To share our lived experience, yet be rejected, talked over, or ignored. In fact, when I came out, I had a family member who I now joke tried to filibuster me out of being trans by literally never giving me a chance to speak.

Often, this is what being trans in the Catholic Church feels like, especially when people in the comments of social media posts fixate on my trans identity itself, ignoring everything else I have to say and making it a goal to discredit me specifically because of my identity. Has something like that ever happened to you? Because you’re a woman? Because you aren’t white? Because you aren’t from “an important family”? It doesn’t feel good. And I can’t picture Jesus treating someone that way (more the opposite, in fact).

Our stories are important not just for community and respect and listening, but also for memory. Sharing our stories is how we remember together. It’s a totally simple and free way to expand our own horizons–it just costs a little time.

I feel that expansiveness when I work with Prism, listening to stories from young trans boy who has always lived in the south and always known that his gender doesn’t fit the script or from a retired gay bar owner who was there when in-person encounters were some of the only ways queer people could find each other.

From story to story, the details change, but I feel the threads that connect all of us in the common experiences that make us smile or wince, and just the beautiful variety of LGBTQ life. There’s always a few big extroverted characters, stepping out on the town in their fiercest outfit, but there’s also the quiet but present people who kept showing up day after day, week after week, and together, built a movement.

These are the stories the rest of the world might never listen to that we keep telling anyway. For the young people who feel like there are no examples to grow up to. For the elders to honor the journey and celebrate the richness of gay lesbian, bisexual, transgender, asexual, queer life.

I’ll be working with Prism some more this summer, capturing more stories and scenes of LGBTQ life in the city where I first started with my own transition. I have been challenged by this place and it’s a joy and an honor to celebrate these people. And in my own way, it’s how I can use my own unique gifts to contribute something beautiful to the chorus of the human family.

View the “Who We Are Campaign“ that Max filmed with Prism United here.

Or, check out a recent essay from Max around the web “What happens when Bishops listen to trans Catholics” published on the Outreach website.