UC Riverside

Interrogating Pope Francis employs institutional genealogies and a queer and trans studies lens to analyze the power dimensions binding the colonial project and the rise of the nation-state to the Catholic Church. In this dissertation, I contextualize the charismatic Pope Francis amongst his predecessors, the institutional Church’s direct adoption of colonial ideologies in the past, and its current support for exclusionary identity politics within national arenas. I conduct close readings of Church documents alongside Pope Francis’s public statements to reveal the evolution and stagnation of Catholic sexual ethics, and the ways in which the Church has intentionally separated sexual ethics from Catholic social teachings as a means to reject platforms for gender and sexual justice. This genealogy unearths the interrelated but paradoxically juxtaposed Catholic teachings on natural law, human dignity, sexual ethics, and social justice. My analysis further reveals the intentionally divisive and exclusionary direction Francis and the Catholic Church continue to assume in relation to peoples of nondominant sexes, genders, and sexualities: a direction that directly upholds the Church’s colonial legacy.