Out of the Closet in Contentious Times: A Comparison of the Beliefs, Expectations, and Political Positions of LGBT+ Catholics in Italy and South Korea

Since the early 2000s, in several countries, LGBT+ rights have opened highly divisive debates that have led traditional religious lobbies and conservative right-wing politicians to oppose permissive policies. Although Roman Catholic authorities still sustain conservative positions on gender- and sexually-related matters, Catholic LGBT+ associations have increasingly fostered a more inclusive interpretation of Catholic doctrines while respecting religious traditions. Despite being a minority within Catholic communities, these associations acquired a growing visibility and they started to play a more assertive role, if not to take stronger political stances, over LGBT+ rights. Drawing upon semi-structured interviews with Catholic queer laypersons, their allies, and community leaders, this article investigates the beliefs, expectations, and political engagement of LGBT+ Catholics involved in religious LGBT+ organizations in Italy and South Korea in the last two decades. Although Italy and South Korea belong to distinct cultural areas, LGBT+ rights have acquired a prominent space in the public debates in these countries in which the process of secularization has made significant inroads and the defence of traditional family values is fiercely sustained by traditionalist Christian organizations with strong political linkages. This paper shows how dissimilar sociocultural contexts, particularly the attitudes of national Catholic authorities, the role of allies, and the political influence of traditionalist organizations shape the expectations, experiences, and public positioning of LGBT+ Catholics. It also notes that contextual factors have a greater impact on the actions of LGBT+ Catholics than on their religious beliefs. Finally, the paper points out how in the increasingly secularized Italian and Korean societies, LGBT+ Catholic organizations have shown a great capacity to accommodate religious doctrines and more permissive attitudes towards sexuality to the extent that their message has reached those people who are not practising but are still attached to their religious cultural background. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it provides a cross-cultural investigation of the intersections between religion, non-normative sexualities, and politics in a period in which LGBT+ rights have created some strains in religious communities. Second, it explores the under-researched domain of Catholic LGBT+ organizations and their relationships with national religious contexts characterized by a dramatic progression of secularization. In doing so, the paper presents a novel and more comprehensive approach to the scholarship dealing with post-secularism and morality politics in our age characterized by a dramatic re-configuration of social and religious dynamics.