Seeing the Unseen? Silenced Voices, Excluded Knowledge, and the Question of Representation in the World Church

This article tries to make visible unseen aspects, silenced voices and excluded knowledge within the tradition of the Catholic Church and its discourse politics by bringing ecclesiology into conversation with post-/decolonial theories and critical whiteness studies. This allows for a critical look at the power of discourses in identity constructions, as well as in processes of representation and exclusion. The issue of privileges, which are typically invisible to those who hold them and only felt by the marginalized, is also addressed. This attitude of an active ignorance can also be detected in the church’s discourses. Special attention is given to the argument that questions concerning the role of women within the church, as well as gender and LGBTQIA* issues, cannot be tackled or changed in the church because doing so would endanger the unity of the world church. A closer examination of this argument reveals that the appeal to the unity of the world church is a discourse-political strategy designed to a void questioning the status quo. Postcolonial analyses, however, reveal a surprising diversity and plurality of gender roles and ideas about sexualities in the precolonial world—diversities that were erased during missionary encounters in colonial times.