The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned June 4 that Mercy Sister Margaret Farley’s 2006 book, “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” contains “erroneous propositions” on homosexual acts, same-sex marriage, masturbation and remarriage after divorce that could cause confusion and “grave harm to the faithful.”
In a notification signed by U.S. Cardinal William J. Levada and approved March 16 by Pope Benedict XVI, the congregation said the book “is not in conformity with the teaching of the church” and “cannot be used as a valid expression of Catholic teaching, either in counseling and formation, or in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.”
Sister Farley, who taught at Yale University Divinity School from 1971 to 2007 and now serves as Gilbert L. Stark professor emerita of Christian ethics, is a past president of both the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Society of Christian Ethics.
As of this morning, the book is up to #19 on the Amazon.com best seller list.
This is but another op-ed in a recent series of defenses of progressive RC nuns. It might be helpful if clergy outside the RCC wrote some letters supporting the reasonableness of the Vatican’s concerns.
The Vatican may have done the publisher a favor. Accordiing to the Washington Post, the book has leaped from obscurity to Amazon’s best-seller list.
The MSM has done the publisher a favor, by fanning the flames and making this an “our values vs. the Big, Bad Vatican” issue.
It’s a momentary blip on the sales. The important thing is that it has done its own members, and those outside, a favor by drawing a line in the sand and enforcing it – saying that this is the boundary of Catholic teaching both on paper and in practice.
If TEC had done that through most of the 20th Century it’d be in a very different place now. Statements of doctrine and ethics need to be not just signed and put on a website, but used when someone steps over the boundary to say that that person has done that. There will always be kickback when you do it, but your long term health depends on it.