Listen to me. I am taking all of your faces in my hands. i am not a picky worldbuilding person at all but i must speak my truth here.
In a setting where soulmates are an actually provable phenomenon, PARTICULARLY when they are physical (soulmarks, etc), and same-gender soulmates are a thing that happens (and there would be), there would NOT be Catholic Church Homophobia. I’m not saying there would be no homophobia but it would not come from the Catholic Church
btw this is not necessarily a pro-church post but it IS saying that Catholics would go batshit bananas for provable soulmates. like are you kidding me? I can literally hear the sermon now. "god not only made you special he made you someone to match with you forever and help you Carry Your Cross AND he gave you a map to help you find them. he didn't even give that to his son (bc he needed to make a point probably) but in his infinite love and mercy he gave that to us." same gender as you?? well god must have that on purpose cause he doesn't make mistakes. people who argue for intelligent design would go insane over soulmates. there could be homophobia from other places but no catholic church homophobia for sure
hi poet how about this interpretation on the stance of the catholic church:
what if soulmates originated from jesus' sacrifice? suppose for the sake of argument that judas was jesus's soulmate and is a common interpretation in a soulmate universe's churches. suppose that god saw one of his son's apostles, one of his closest friends, a soulmate, perhaps even a man that jesus loved, betray him. is his betrayal not named the kiss of judas?
even though his remorse drove him to his own death, perhaps god mourned the betrayal of his son by that which completes him even if jesus didn't. perhaps the interpretation of the catholic church in this instance might have been, god was angry, and god wished to raze the earth for what judas did to the gift that was a very extension of his own being. and yet jesus pleaded for mercy, for judas did not know they were entwined, body and soul.
perhaps, in his mercy, and in his anger, god bestowed the very gift on every person born from that day onwards - that they might be bound to another soul for all eternity, and that they might be given a map; that should any of god's children ever betray their other half, they should know it intimately, and suffer for their sins.
or something. i'm not catholic.
no no I am seeing it eve i am seeing the Vision.
Okay also consider, within your interpretation, that this could add another layer to the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther and friends instead instead believe that Mary Magdalene was Jesus's soulmate, not Judas, and another layer of the betrayal was the kiss of someone who ISN'T your soulmate. Do you see how much fun we are having here—
i am now partly losing my mind about the jesus's sacrifice gifting people's soulmates because i am now left with what feels like the matching nondenominationally christian discourse:
were adam and eve soulmates?
i feel like there are some christians (catholics, perhaps?) that would argue that they were, and that this was god's intention. He made Eve of Adam's rib, after all, she was cut from the very same cloth, two halves of one whole, and they completed one another, as was god's intention.
but on the other hand, there are entire doctrines about how Eve was a "temptress" and that she seduced Adam to disobeying god once the serpent spoke to her. and discourse of the misogynistic kind, of course, that does she have a "complete" soul in and of herself, if it was created in it's entirety from the rib of Adam? can she, indeed, be called a soulmate if she had betrayed Adam and had them both cast out of Eden, much as Judas would later betray his own soulmate, Jesus? if so, then perhaps that's yet another foundation of the Protestant Reformation in soulmate verses - perhaps they would argue that a soulmate is unequivocally unable to betray their soulmate, and thus it must have been Mary Magdalene, and not Judas, and that Eve was a temptress with a deficient soul. oh my god we ARE having so much fun with this
I am imagining discourse spanning from christianity because of this about either, do women have complete souls at all, or is one complete without a soulmate - both of which i feel are completely reasonable conclusions that the church would come to in parallel of our modern world, as there is the obviously patriarchal society, as well as the insistence on marriage and monogamy.
i also think its fascinating with our modern real world parallel of the recent movements towards people being fulfilled without romantic relationships, i'm imagining some kind of a rejection of the notion that a soulmate is one that completes you but is instead one that uplifts you.
this got away from me again
Okay okay but listen. Listen. Consider, in a world of provable soulmates that are visible such as soulmarks, is marriage as we know it even like. A thing?
If we take marriage as a social construct as a way to say “this is my person forever” and marriage as a legal construct as a way to say “this person can represent me if I cannot represent myself” then like. Wouldn’t soulmarks just be a stand in for both of those things? Why would you need a piece of paper to do that with your soulmate, you literally have the fact that you were Matched By The Universe written on your skin???
What if marriage, at least in the west, is instead something that existed only among the upper class for a long time, because so many noble joinings weren’t soulmate matches but about money and land and bloodline? And getting Officially Married in the modern day is seen as kinda weird and counterculture at best and kinda icky at worst because, like, are you marrying them for their land, bro? Are you cosplaying as a Hapsburg for some reason? Maybe a middle or lower class person who has a wedding is seen as putting on airs or something.
And then imagine what that does to people who don’t want their soulmate to have those legal powers over them (what if your soulmate is a real piece of shit?), or people who have soulmates they love non-romantically who also want a legal spouse. Or like—if two soulmates find each other when they’re minors, how does that intersect with parental rights?
Can a soulmate force a divorce between their soulmate and someone their married, or at least take it to court? Does that change if the married party is a woman?
