James Alison
James Alison is an English Catholic priest and theologian. Alison is noted for his application of René Girard's anthropological theory to Christian systematic theology and for his work on LGBT issues.
Life and work
Early years and family
James Alison was born on 4 October 1959 in London. He has a brother and a sister.His father, Michael Alison, was a prominent Conservative Member of Parliament and minister in Margaret Thatcher's government. He was an Evangelical Christian, a John Stott's convert. His mother, Sylvia Mary Alison, embraced Evangelical Christianity under the influence of Billy Graham's missionary work. Alison described his parents as "part of that generation that sought to redefine Christianity as being a hardline, moralistic and conservative political social movement".
Alison went to Eton College, a prestigious boarding school.
Conversion to Catholicism and education
Alison left the Church of England at the age of eighteen to join the Roman Catholic Church.He studied Spanish and History at New College of the University of Oxford. After the second year of his bachelor's degree, he went to Mexico on student exchange, at the end of which joined the Mexican Dominicans in 1981. There, he completed a postulancy and started the novitiate with Raul Vera as his novice master.
"For cultural and temperamental differences", he left Mexico in 1983 to complete novitiate in England, at Blackfriars, Oxford. There, his novice master was Herbert McCabe, in Alison's opinion, "probably the most significant Thomistic thinker in the English language in the 20th century" and "a wonderful teacher, and something of a father figure to me".
Pastoral ministry and ordination
In 1986, Alison took part in a conference organised by the English Dominicans to propose Catholic pastoral involvement with AIDS. This led to his first publication, a CTS pamphlet, Catholic and AIDS: Questions and Answers.In 1987, Alison went to continue his studies at the Jesuit theology faculty in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He was ordained in 1988. While working on his theology degree between 1987 and 1990, he ministered to people with AIDS who – in Alison's words – "it would be more accurate to say were dying with AIDS than living, because this was before any of the cocktails 80% died within five months of first symptom, so a lot of what I was doing was giving people last rites and burial."
René Girard and early works
In 1985, Alison came across René Girard's book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. This encounter with the French thinker has produced a seismic and lasting impact. Starting from Alison's first monograph, Knowing Jesus, this influence has been made explicit. In this book, he introduced the idea of "the intelligence of the victim" to explain the change taking place in Jesus' disciples after meeting the risen Christ.From 1990 to 1994, Alison worked on his doctoral thesis about original sin at the Jesuit theology faculty in Belo Horizonte. He defended it successfully in November 1994. At Easter 1995, he left the Dominicans realising he was a "guest, not a member" there.
In 1997, Alison produced a monograph, Living in the End Times, which was an adaptation and translation of the course on Eschatology delivered at the Instituto Pedro de Cordoba, Chile, in 1994. In 1998, the English-language version of his doctorate was published under the title The Joy of Being Wrong.
Author, preacher, lecturer and retreat giver
Since 1995 onwards, Alison remained a priest, though not incardinated in any diocese. In the following six years, he moved countries seven times living in Latin America, the United States and the UK.In 2001, the Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay was published. It was the first book in which Alison attempted to set Catholic theology and Girardian insights into the context of the experience of a gay man and the wider LGBTQ+ community. He admits this task was not an easy one: “There is nothing elegant about inhabiting a space which has historically, socially and theologically been regarded at best as risible and at worst as evil”.
In the following years, three more collections of essays and talks appeared: On Being Liked, Undergoing God and Broken Hearts and New Creations - written broadly from the same perspective as the Faith Beyond Resentment.
Since 2008, Alison has been awarded a fellowship at Imitatio, the organisation set up by the Thiel Foundation for researching and promoting René Girard's thought. For a while, he lived in São Paulo, Brazil.
In 2013, he produced the Jesus the Forgiving Victim, a multimedia course of induction into the Christian faith for adults which follows on from the insight into desire associated with René Girard.
In 2020, Alison started Praying Eucharistically, a project exploring the ways of worshipping and Christian living in the COVID lockdown. For this project, he provides the appropriate liturgical texts for people celebrating at home, and offers Gospel readings and homilies in video format for Sundays and main festivities of the liturgical year.
Currently he works as a travelling preacher, lecturer and retreat giver, based in Madrid, Spain.
Clerical status
Alison was a member of the Dominican order – from 1981 to 1995. In 1996, he wrote to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith telling them that he believed his vows to be null as they been taken while under a conscience based on the "false premise of gay people being objectively disordered and thus celibacy being obligatory". He offered to let them issue a decree saying that his ordination was null, but they declined, saying it was valid. Instead, the congregation asked him to seek laicisation, but Alison declined: "The form for doing that also required that lies be told, so, on the advice of a canon lawyer, I did nothing and heard nothing."More than 10 years later, a superior in the Dominican order asked if Alison would object to his processing paperwork dismissing Alison from the order. Alison said he had no objection to the outcome of the process, but would not participate actively as he believed he was never truly a member anyway. He eventually received a letter stating that he was a priest in good standing, not currently incardinated but available to be incardinated if a bishop wished to have him.
While living in Brazil, the local bishop asked for Alison's consent to be laicised. Alison declined, but instead offered to be incardinated into the diocese. The bishop declined that offer. The bishop then began a process of laicization without Alison's consent using a recent change in canon law; Alison was not informed of any charges, and believed this use of canon law was not applicable to his situation. A year later, a letter from the Congregation for the Clergy arrived announcing that Alison had been dismissed from clerical status, forbidding him from teaching, preaching, or presiding. According to the letter, this decision was unappealable. For Alison, "it was shocking to be tangential to a process in which it is unnecessary to inform the one charged of the charges against him, in which no legal representation is permitted, and whose sentence does not require the signature of the sentencee".
A friendly bishop, who was once Alison's novice master, hand delivered a letter to Pope Francis in May 2017 concerning his situation. In the letter, Alison asked the Pope to make his situation regular; he proposed to treat the congregation's letter "as null, and to carry on as before". On 2 July 2017, Pope Francis called Alison directly. According to Alison, Pope Francis told him, "I want you to walk with deep interior freedom, following the Spirit of Jesus. And I give you the power of the keys." Alison understood from this that Pope Francis did not perceive the congregation's decision as binding; that he treated him as a priest giving him universal jurisdiction to hear confessions and preach, the two faculties traditionally associated with the power of the keys. Alison noted that this was how Pope Francis had acted towards those he appointed as missionaries during the 2016 Jubilee of Mercy. Pope Francis has never made a written statement to confirm his call and its content. However he did confirm it orally the following year in an audience with Bishop Raúl Vera, O.P.,. It is not clear to Alison himself, or to anybody else, where this leaves him canonically. But that the Pope, as the source of the authority on which the Congregation for the Clergy relied in its letter, is able to perform an immediate act of the Universal Ordinary giving a priest such jurisdiction irrespective of any decision by the Congregation, is not in doubt.
Theology
Girardian influence
To a very large extent, Alison's theology rests on the anthropological – psychological and sociological – insights of René Girard's understanding of mimetic desire, scapegoating, and conversion. He explained this influence as follows:"What has excited me ever since I came across René Girard's thought has been the fecundity for theology of Girard's mimetic insight concerning desire and violence. Thanks to Girard's insight into the scapegoat mechanism at work throughout human culture it has become possible to make sense of Jesus’ death as being salvific for us in a way that is entirely orthodox and takes us away from imputing any vengeance or retribution to God. Girard has also opened up for me a very rich hermeneutic for Scripture, one that avoids the temptations to Marcionism on the one hand and Fundamentalism on the other."He reflected on Girard's influence on his own thought on numerous occasions.