"Vocation in the Flesh": Gender and Embodiment in Religious Anthropology of Contemporary Catholicism

Abstract

In the early and medieval Christian tradition, the gendered body was understood as both an obstacle to the cultivation of virtues and a potential medium of transgression. The contemporary Catholic anthropology has another view of the subject's body and its senses and desires. This article is concerned with the pastoral project of encouraging priestly and monastic callings in the Russian Catholic parishes. It also specifically looks at its rhetoric, placing significant emphasis on gendered embodiment. Based on participant observation materials and interviews with Catholics, who are “called”, the author analyzes the strategies of making a calling to celibacy genuine and persuasive. By including gender and sexuality within the concept of vocation, such rhetoric allows not only to show the consecrated life as something attractive, more intelligible and real but also to raise awareness of what true masculinity and femininity are. Despite the fact that Church discipline prescribes solitude, in this new rhetoric celibacy does not require one to become a disembodied and asexual angel. Conversely, by applying gendered embodiment religious specialists emphasize its utmost importance for the vocation, which presupposes celibacy, thereby confronting both early Christian perspective on the sinful body and secular views on the constructed gender.