This Friday, two drag performers, Lupa Nova and Amélie Putain, are scheduled to appear at the Grabenhalle for an evening called Deep Drag.
The event is being organized in collaboration with Katholisch St. Gallen. The program promises drag performances mixed with “social, spiritual and cultural questions,” moderated conversation and reflection on identity, memory and hope. Admission is free.
The Catholic theologian involved, Ann-Katrin Gässlein, even finds a theological analogy between drag and Christianity: “transformation,” she argues, stands at the center of Catholic faith. She says the collaboration is meant to send a signal for diversity within society and the Catholic Church.
Transformation.
There is a word doing heroic amounts of work. Christian conversion means the old man dies so that the new man may live in Christ. Drag deliberately manipulates the symbols of sex and identity as performance. These are hardly the same spiritual movement.
Yet the post-conciliar pastoral imagination seems incapable of encountering any contemporary phenomenon without asking how Catholicism can enter into dialogue with it.
A rave?
Dialogue.
Pride?
Dialogue.
Drag?
Dialogue.
What rarely occurs to anybody is that Christianity sometimes encounters a culture and says: No.
No hostility toward the person.
No humiliation.
Just no.
That word has become ecclesiastically exotic.
Continue reading at Hiraeth in Exile