Can a reconstruction of confession be used to aid understanding and inclusivity of LGBTQIA+ persons within the Church?

By taking structures and processes from the Catholic confessional, I have created an interactive online artistic reconstruction of confession through which I hope to hear the voices of people from the LGBTQIA+ community in relation to their experience with faith, Christianity and the Church. My aim, as this project progresses, is to bring this information back into the church setting as a form of education around how to better foster an inclusive environment for LGBTQIA+ people.

I have felt a void in the Church that needs to be filled with this conversation, and also a fear and hesitance around how to have an open and loving conversation around the subject, which leads to silence and miseducation. To start this conversation, voices need to be heard and amplified, and people need to listen.

This reconstruction takes the viewer through an interactive set of tasks and reflections, created to evoke questioning and sharing. The tasks take the form of a reconstructed Examination of Conscience and are accompanied by immersive audio and video works created by the musician Cecilia and myself. Through this journey, a piece of paper becomes adorned with various answers and responses, in the form of words and drawings. These Reconstructed Testimonies are then shared anonymously on to an open platform for others to see, hear and learn from. 

An institution strongly aligned with this focus of bringing voices to the forefront and creating spaces for those within the LGBTQIA+ community is the Student Christian Movement (SCM) in the UK who ‘come together as an ecumenical and inclusive community, fostering unity in diversity and exploring faith through worship, discussion and action’. In collaboration with SCM, I am sharing this experience through their community to gather testimonials for this project.

The confessional can be seen as an open place to share oneself fully. Additionally, the confessional can be seen as a place to cleanse oneself of sin. This reconstruction stands clearly against this second narrative of cleansing a natural part of a human. Following from Catholic Social Teaching, who a person is cannot be a sin. The reconstruction of the confessional, examination of conscience, testimony and other reconstructed elements of the sacrament of confession focuses on highlighting the narrative of sharing experience without shame, guilt, fear or judgement.