Contemporary interpreters of the mystical body movement in the early twentieth century often refer to works therein as mystical body “ecclesiologies” and tend to identify distinctions among them according to the author’s language or nationality. In this article, I argue that the differences among mystical body theologies in that era are better understood according to theological locus—of “mystical body” as either an ecclesiological or a christological-soteriological concept. This framework best explains the paradoxical evaluations of the mystical body movement more broadly, and the encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi in particular, as simultaneously too vague and too juridical.

This article asks why matters of sex and gender are the nexus of theological and ecclesiological battles to the point of being church-dividing issues. I utilize Mary Douglas’s grid-group theory—her framework for correlating social form, body symbolism, and ritual density—to demonstrate that the body is a symbol of the social world and that different views of the body correspond with different ways of organizing a society. Thus, I argue that gender diversity is being perceived by the Catholic Church as a threat to ecclesial structure as well as to the church’s ritual life.