Wednesday 6 June 2012

The Vatican Taliban gets pissy with an uppity nun

Though I'm not a fan of the NYT's Maureen Dowd, her succinct overview of a theological dispute between Sister Margaret Farley and the dogmatic Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (aka the Catholic Sharia) is pitch-perfect.
[...] the latest chapter in the Vatican’s thuggish crusade to push American nuns — and all Catholic women — back into moldy subservience.

Even for a church that moves glacially, this was classic. “Just Love: a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” by Sister Margaret Farley — a 77-year-old professor emeritus at Yale’s Divinity School, a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and an award-winning scholar — came out in 2006.

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which seems as hostile to women as the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, spent years pondering it, then censured it on March 30 but didn’t publicly release the statement until Monday.

The denunciation of Sister Farley’s book is based on the fact that she deals with the modern world as it is. She refuses to fall in line with a Vatican rigidly clinging to an inbred, illusory world where men rule with no backtalk from women, gays are deviants, the divorced can’t remarry, men and women can’t use contraception, masturbation is a grave disorder and celibacy is enshrined, even as a global pedophilia scandal rages.

In old-fashioned prose steeped in historical and global perspective, Sister Farley’s main argument is that justice needs to govern relationships. In the interest of justice to oneself, she contends that “self-pleasuring” needs “to be moved out of the realm of taboo morality.”


The photograph of Sister Farley is taken from her page at Yale Divinity School. Note that she doesn't wear traditional nun burqa garments.

This fundamentalist zealot, clearly a supporter of the savagely misogynistic Catholic Sharia, trashes her for her radical feminism. Heh.

My dream debate would be Sister Farley going 9 rounds against the odious Margaret Somerville - who has never had and never will, a book on Amazon's bestselling list.

5 comments:

liberal supporter said...

Stop being so mean to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. They've fallen upon lean times in recent centuries. Back in the day, they were somebody and were feared, when they ran the Inquisition. They didn't have to put up with any of this women's lip, they'd just declare them witches and throw a couple on the barbie.

fern hill said...

I saw something about this, but it hadn't impinged that the book is six fucking years old.

And now it's a bestseller. Way to go, Vatican Taliban.

Anonymous said...

There's nothing unusual about the delay:

“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise, fear and surprise; two chief weapons, fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency! Er, among our chief weapons are: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and near fanatical devotion to the Pope! Um, I'll come in again...”

Anonymous said...

Slow readers, lacking in reading comprehension. No surprise here.

Beijing York said...

I know which Margaret I would be cheering for. Brava Ms. Farley!

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