This article is an inter-textual study of the play Angels in America (Part One), Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate and key Catholic writings on homosexuality. I hope to show how the play might inform future Catholic understandings of self-identity, self-acceptance and self-love and how in turn, Catholic writings on the nature of love, sexuality and holiness can assist audiences to understand more deeply the themes and dilemmas in the play. The Catholic Church is immensely forgiving of the human failure to live up to the lofty demands of love and has a strong tradition of asceticism concerning the positive and transformative effects of self-control. However, due to the cognitive dissonance set up by its teaching on homosexuality, and in particular, its claim that there is an incompatibility between gay identity and ordained priestly identity, the Church has tended to retreat into a world of silence about the importance of self-knowledge to assuage the dissonance it feels. The dramatic deleterious consequences seen in the play about the failure to love oneself are a stark warning to the Church that this might not be the best or most pastoral path to take.

This article is concerned with the social theory of Zygmunt Bauman. It will highlight recurring themes within his writing with particular reference to three of his works, Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and Ambivalence, and Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. It will trace his argument that Modernity constituted a process of gradual de-animation of Nature and disenchantment of the world, a condition that post-modernity aims to reverse. It will discuss his contention about the catastrophic effects of the strategies of instrumental Reason and Modernity’s relentless urge to design and order the whole of human existence. It will demonstrate some of the awful consequences of such strategies. The tension between human attempts to structure the world and its self-defeating failures to do so, becomes the central motif in Bauman’s work: a tension witnessed most visibly in the on-going confrontation between Reason and ambiguity.

Bauman learned the limitations of structuralism from Levi-Strauss. What fascinated him was the Modem urge to structure everything, the constant attempt to find the social structure, the underlying structure of everything; that ambivalence could be eliminated.