The Catholic pastoral office of St. Gallen, Switzerland, is co-organizing a free drag event in a public hall, and a church-employed liturgist will moderate it on stage this Friday evening.
Titled “Deep Drag – Memory and Hope,” the program will feature a St. Gallen “drag performer” referred to as “Lupa Nova” and “drag queen Amélie Putain” who, according to local media, are “working together with the city chaplaincy of Katholisch St.Gallen.”
The St. Gallen Catholic Church website highlights an advertisement for the event.
The format mixes “drag performances” with interviews and discussion facilitated by Ann-Katrin Gässlein, identified as an employed theologian in the pastoral offices the Catholic Church in St. Gallen, and a research assistant at the Chair of Liturgy Studies of the University of Lucerne.
According to a report by traditional Catholic writer and commentator Chris Jackson, Gässlein “even finds a theological analogy between drag and Christianity: ‘transformation,’ she argues, stands at the center of Catholic faith. She says the collaboration is meant to send a signal for diversity within society and the Catholic Church.”
In response to this presentation, Jackson clarified that “Christian conversion means the old man dies so that the new man may live in Christ. Drag deliberately manipulates the symbols of sex and identity as performance. These are hardly the same spiritual movement.”
He argues that post-conciliar pastoral practice meets every cultural fashion with “dialogue”—a rave, Pride, drag—and has forgotten that Christianity can simply say no: “No hostility toward the person. No humiliation. Just no.”