Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Plagued by Scandal, Vatican Focuses Instead on Attacking American Nun

Apparently in the minds of the bitter old men in dresses at the Vatican the way to counter a steady drip of scandals is to attack women or at least American nuns who seemingly have stopped drinking the Vatican's Kool-Aid, accept modern knowledge and see sexuality as something more than a nasty means to produce more children that can be subjected to religious brainwashing by the bitter old men.  In the upside down world of the Nazi Pope and his fellow child rapist enablers and protectors in Rome things like masturbation, homosexuality, gay marriage and divorce are the greatest evils facing the world - or at least Roman Catholicism.  Would that the legions of predator priests had pleasured themselves via masturbation rather than raping and molesting tens, if not hundreds of thousand of children and youth around the world while the Vatican sought to sweep it all under the rug.  But to the bitter, power mad cardinals at the Vatican (who at times  strike me as a modern version of the power hungry court eunuchs of the ancient Persian Empire) anything that strikes as sexual pleasure is an abomination.  First, these highlights from Reuters and the ongoing infighting in the Vatican:

Pope Benedict got no rest on Sunday from a leaks scandal when an Italian newspaper published documents showing that his butler was not the only person in possession of confidential correspondence indicating a Vatican in disarray.  

[I]n its Sunday edition, the Rome newspaper La Repubblica published documents it said it had received anonymously after the arrest of the pope's butler on May 23.  A note received by the newspaper said there were "hundreds more" documents and that the butler, Paolo Gabriele, was just a scapegoat.  The furor over the leaked correspondence, which shows power-hungry cardinals and scheming within the walls of the city state, has gripped the Vatican .  .  .  .  
Unable to keep their own house in order, much less protect children and youth from sexual predators, the Vatican nonetheless lashed out at the book, “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics” by Sister Margaret Farley.  Priestly sexual abuse of children and youth is apparently okay with the Vatican so long as the media doesn't get wind of it.  But healthy, normal sexuality - both gay and straight - is something abhorrent.  Indeed "intrinsically and gravely disordered actions."  Here are excerpts from the Toronto Star:

The Vatican on Monday sharply criticized a book on sexuality written by a prominent American nun, saying it contradicted church teaching on issues like masturbation, homosexuality and marriage and that its author had a “defective understanding” of Catholic theology.

The Vatican’s orthodoxy office said the book, “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics” by Sister Margaret Farley, a member of the Sisters of Mercy religious order and emeritus professor of Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School, posed “grave harm” to the faithful.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [formerly known as The Inquisition] said that in the 2006 book, Farley either ignored church teaching on core issues of human sexuality or treated it as merely one opinion among many.

The Farley critique, signed by the American head of the congregation, Cardinal William Levada, comes amid the Vatican’s recent crackdown on the largest umbrella group of American sisters. The Vatican last month essentially imposed martial law on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, accusing it of undermining church teaching and imposing certain “radical feminist themes” that were incompatible with Catholicism.

It ordered a full-scale overhaul of the group and appointed three bishops to carry it out.
The crackdown on Farley, a top American theologian, will likely fuel greater resentment at Rome among more liberal-minded American sisters.

The Vatican examination of the book began in 2010 and involved seeking Farley’s responses to its concerns. After her replies failed to satisfy the Congregation, it moved to a full-fledged “examination in cases of urgency” that concluded Dec. 14.

 Farley, for example, writes that masturbation doesn’t raise any moral problems and can actually help relationships rather than hinder them. The Vatican asserted that according to church teaching “masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.”

Farley wrote that homosexual people as well as their activities should be respected. Church teaching holds that gays should be respected but that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.”

On gay marriage, Farley said legal recognition of gay marriage can help transform the stigmatization of gays. Levada wrote back that approving gay marriage would not only signal approval of “deviant behaviour” but would obscure the value of traditional marriage between man and woman in society.

Farley has received 11 honorary degrees over her lifetime, is a past president of the Society of Christian Ethics and the Catholic Theological Society of America, and won an award in 2008 for “Just Love.”  That said, Farley doesn’t identify herself as a member of the Sisters of Mercy on either her official Yale biography or on the book’s cover.

No comments: