The Vatican is attacking a retired theologian nun,
Sister Margaret Farley, for her book on human sexuality published in 2006.
At Amazon.Com:
Just
Love: a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics," by Sister
Margaret Farley
Can’t have women let alone nuns define what the
Vatican Penis Cult is only allowed to define in what to do with your naughty
parts etc.
----
Taking on the Council of Trent and a church that has taken a stand against pleasure, Farley asserts that procreation is not the only reason couples should have sex.
Fruitfulness need not "refer only to the conceiving of children," she writes. "It can refer to multiple forms of fruitfulness in love of others, care for others, making the world a better place for others" rather than just succumbing to "an egoisme a deux." (“Love is a selfishness of two.”)
The Vatican showed no mercy to the Sister of Mercy, proclaiming that "the deliberate use of the sexual faculty" outside of marriage or procreation, or on one's own, is wrong; that homosexual sex acts are "deviant," and that marriages are by and large indissoluble. Farley issued a statement that she did not intend for the book to be an expression or criticism of current official Catholic teaching, and academics and the head of her order rushed to her defense.
This latest ignoble fight with a noble nun adds to the picture of a Catholic Church in a permanent defensive crouch, steeped in Borgia-like corruption and sexual scandals, lashing out at anyone who notes the obvious: They have lost track of right and wrong.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York blasted The New York Times after Laurie Goodstein wrote that, as the archbishop of Milwaukee in 2003, he authorized payments of up to $20,000 to sexually abusive priests "as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood."
Dolan insisted through a spokesman that it was "charity," not "payoffs." But if you were the parent of a boy abused by a priest who went away with 20,000 bucks, maybe "charity" is not the word that would come to mind.Its crisis has made the church cruel. The hierarchy should read Farley's opprobrium against adults harming vulnerable children and adolescents by sexually exploiting them; respect for the individual and requirement of free consent, she says, mean that rape, violence and pedophilia against unwilling victims are never justified.
"Seduction and manipulation of persons who have limited capacity for choice because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary power, are ruled out," she writes.
If only the church could muster that kind of clarity, rather than Dolan-style "charity."
