This book is a moving collection of sixty-eight personal reflections that “offers insights into the lived reality of Catholic or formerly Catholic people with an LGBTQIA+ background” (xx) in Germany. It gives voice to a complex spectrum of ways in which LGBTQIA+ people wrestle to be at home with themselves in the Catholic Church experienced paradoxically as familial and alienating. The church is “sanctuary and snare” (167), wrote one contributor. Written with searing and disarming honesty, the reflections draw the reader to witness not only the pain, anger, shame, and grief that LGBTQIA+ Catholics experience, but also their consolation and audacious hope in God’s faithful love at the margins of where they live and worship. As another contributor testified, “For a long time, I fought with God about my calling to same-sex love. This path wasn’t distant from God, but a path on which I was led by God who accompanied me with his loving closeness” (163).

The diversity of experiences captured in this collection is significant. As the editor Rothe highlights in his introduction, “The picture that emerged is as colorful as it is complex. There is not ‘one’ feeling, experience, or journey of queer Catholics” (xxii). The contributors are not only LGBTQIA+ people of different ages and in various professions; they also include their parents, grandparents, siblings, partners, and pastors, among others. Noteworthy are the voices of transgender persons and their parents, especially when their experiences of faith are often misunderstood—if not silenced—as the church wrestles with issues of gender identity.

Rothe’s effort to include diverse voices makes the important point about how the experiences of LGBTQIA+ persons in the church affect the relationships and shape the lived faith of the wider community of people who know and love them. As a “pastoral project” (xxiii) this work reflects what Wendy VanderWal-Gritter called “generous spaciousness.”Footnote ¹ This is a pastoral approach that calls for cisgender and heterosexual members of the church to adopt a posture of openness to LGBTQIA+ Christians’ stories. This allows the multiple ambiguities that arise from their way of loving to form the whole church spiritually through deep listening, genuine discernment, and sincere dialogue.Footnote ²

The book’s title provocatively frames the collection as “Queerness in the Catholic Church.” Rothe uses queerness as an encompassing term for LGTBQIA+ people, affirming the full complexity of their identities as a gift to rather than a problem for the Catholic Church. “Queerness can be a powerful lens, helping [LGBTQIA+] Christians proclaim [their] faith with pride, in a way that issues a genuine invitation to others to participate in something [they] know to be truly life giving,” writes the Reverend Elizabeth Edman.Footnote ³ Queerness interrupts the cis-heteronormative ecclesial culture when the realities of LGBTQIA+ lives not only speak of and against the suffering caused by the magisterium’s moral teaching on sexuality; queerness also invokes, provokes, and summons the church to bear witness to the radicality of God’s gratuitous love for those at the margins.

As a result, this book serves as a critical resource to facilitate the task of building a “synodal” Catholic Church. As Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv writes in the foreword, “The best part of our Catholic tradition has always paid attention to human experience and the multiplicity of ways that God reveals God’s self, often to our surprise. This collection contributes to this tradition at a time when we are once again learning to listen so that we can walk together” (xiii). Queerness mandates a synodal church to be vulnerable, to take the risk to learn from and be transformed by LGBTQIA+ people’s experiences of life, love and God, to which this book is instructive. A contributor to the book, who identifies as a trans person, shares: “Despite deeply hurtful experiences and shocks to my image of the Church, I am still convinced that the institution can learn from direct contact and encounters with trans people and their own questions of faith and life as a matter of course through direct contacts and encounters” (9).