It seems that the bitter old queens in dresses at the Vatican can't do anything right. Their program of deliberately hiding the rampant sexual abuse of children and youths by priests blew up in their face a decade ago and continues to explode literally daily somewhere around the world, costing the Church billions of dollars in the process. Lately, the Nazi Pope cannot even keep his private correspondence private and the hierarchy finds itself in a political war with the President of the United States. And then there's the issue of the troublesome, uppity American nuns who refuse to conform to the Vatican's version of keeping women barefoot and pregnant. Now, because of the Vatican's condemnation, an obscure book by an American nun on sexual ethics - which doesn't conform to the Vatican's own sick obsession with sex and anything pleasurable - has become a best seller. It couldn't happen to a group more deserving of humiliation and exposure as hypocrites. A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at the Vatican's disastrous attack on Sr. Margaret A. Farley’s book. Here are some highlights:
If Margaret A. Farley’s fine theo-ethical work causes “grave harm to the faithful,” Catholics live very graced lives. War, poverty, ecocide, racism, colonialism, sex and gender injustices of all sorts come to mind in the “grave harm” category. But not in the wildest imagination of anyone other than a Vatican bureaucrat would Dr. Farley’s sexual ethics qualify.
Recent attention to her work only serves to deepen her impact and broaden her audience; 24 hours after news broke of the Vatican censure the book was propelled from an Amazon ranking of 142,982 to 16.The June 4th Notification from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) [formerly known as the Inquisition] titled “Regarding the Book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Sister Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M.,” left many scandalized by the intellectually embarrassing and morally tawdry work of a group that obviously needs a permanent vacation. William Cardinal Levada and company at the CDF are simply out of their league theologically when it takes them 6 years (the book was published in 2006) to comment on an important work—and they still get it wrong.
A first-year graduate student could have handled the analysis in a week. S/he would have figured out that Dr. Farley was dealing with ethical method—how we frame and approach moral questions—not defending the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Vatican interlocutors, who obviously have no clue about such matters, only embarrass themselves by publishing their ignorance in six languages. They leave the distinct impression that they are oblivious to the fact that postmodern ethical analysis emerges from multi-disciplinary, multi-religious discussions grounded in concrete actions for justice.
A scholar of Margaret Farley’s stature must terrify the staff of the CDF. She is, after all, the Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School; a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America which gave her its highest award in 1992; as well as a past president of the Society of Christian Ethics.
Rather than embrace her project and explore, as she does, the range of ways that good people try to love—with an emphasis on the demands of justice in every intimate relationship—the CDF theologians boiled down her opus into five cherry-picked nuggets on sex and marriage that reflect their priorities, not hers. They missed the forest for the trees. Their statement is deeply insulting, not to mention morally suspect, in that such a stellar scholar’s reputation is impugned. As my mother would say, “Consider the source.”
The Roman men are hell-bent on reining in American nuns, if only to prove that they can rein in somebody in a world that pays them increasingly little heed. They fear that such intellectually powerful and theologically persuasive women, who identify with the institutional Roman Catholic Church through their membership in canonical communities, will trump them in the public arena.
The Notification’s 5 little points need no rehearsal. Her critics simply miss the fact that Margaret Farley does not do ethics the way that they do. She does not share their ethical priorities on what Catholic moral theologian Daniel C. Maguire calls matters of the “pelvic zone.” . . . . But the fact that they would dwell on it speaks volumes about their ethics and their rapidly eroding power. Sexual power is power, and more and more women have it. Apparently the struggle to wrest it back is high on the agenda of those who live on the 110 acres called the Vatican.
The impact of Margaret Farley’s work will be measured in many ways, but none will be more accurate than an assessment of her long-term commitment to women who live with HIV/AIDS in Africa. . . . .
The result was practical, not theoretical—the founding of a now-flourishing NGO, All-Africa Conference: Sister to Sister, with support from Margaret’s community, the Sisters of Mercy. She still makes regular visits to Uganda and Cameroon to teach and learn as a collaborator.
The organization “brings together women religious so that they may address the crisis of HIV and AIDS by listening to, learning from and empowering one another to collaborate in strategies for prevention and care in response to the pandemic.
Long after the Vatican’s Notification has been forgotten, generations will recognize that the HIV/AIDS pandemic occasioned a seismic shift in moral theology. Real world experience drives the discussion. Margaret Farley’s name will forever be associated with Catholic moral theology that does justice.
The psychological and emotional sickness of the bitter men at the Vatican - and in bishoprics around the world - is becoming more and more obvious to both Catholics and non-Catholics and is why more and more Americans chose to ignore the pontificating of the morally bankrupt old men in Rome. The irony is that as they strive to "protect the Church" they are the ones who are killing it long term.
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