Thread by @DaultRadio

A #thread 🧵

There is a Catholic practice whose goal is incarceration, and a Catholic practice whose goal is liberation. Everything else is just public relations. 1/

By "Catholic practice" we mean something geographic: not simply the reproduction of liturgical space within the architecture of worship, but the creation of human spaces and human relationships with material effects throughout society. 2/

Catholicism has always sought to occupy the cultural space; the question has always been whether this occupancy is one of totalizing authority or ubiquitous hospitality. 3/

Totalizing authority in the ancient days of the Church involved Donatism, Manicheism, and eventually Constantinism. In our current days it is the spirit that drives the variant of Dominionism known as Integralism. 4/

In Augustine's response to the Donatists, we see an early example of ubiquitous hospitality: a geography that sought to welcome the largest number of the faithful, assuming a pastoral rather than a gatekeeping response. 5/

It is not enough to say that some manifestations of the Catholic faith are "authoritarian," because they are not simply a struggle of conceptions of the faith, as if the same material structures could be occupied at different points by an authoritarian or a benign Spirit. 6/

Authoritarian Catholicism is irreducibly wedded to material structures, and a shift from authoritarian Catholicism will necessitate the transformation to not simply new ideas, but to entirely novel material structures. That is why we refer to these struggles as geographic. 7/

A realization of the synodal path, as an ongoing praxis, will entail the rearrangement and construction of old material relations into new Catholic geographies. 8/

At present, a set of Catholic practices (particularly in the American sphere of influence) preferred by a majority of the North American bishops and allied with authoritarianism have resulted in an alliance with material structures of criminalization and incarceration. 9/

These structures are operating at all levels of the American sphere (with Bishops and laity exerting influence in political, judicial, media, economic, and other spaces) - all aimed at criminalization. Hence, the use of the term, "carceral Catholicism," as a descriptor. 10/

Thus "carceral Catholicism" is defined as a Catholic geography of incarceration. It is aimed toward the criminalization of human bodies and human relationships. It seeks to regulate and control against surprising behavior and relationships. 11/

A Catholic geography of liberation, then, might be called "abolitionist Catholicism." It would be aimed toward community, instead of criminalization. It would be predicated on the function of interrelated mechanisms of synodality, subsidiarity, and solidarity. 12/

(This is as far as I got so far in this line of thinking - but I may add to this thread later, and I certainly welcome folks to add thoughts, ask questions, and think with me. Thanks) 13/13 (for now)