What are the differences in sexual philosophy between Hugh Hefner and Sister of Mercy nun Margaret Farley?Actually, it's a trick question. There are no differences.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner, a Contributing Editor of the New Oxford Review, reviews for that magazine a new book by the proudly heretical nun. Brace yourself.
Our holy Catholic Church is in dire straits. Never mind those self-described "Catholic" politicians and judges who thumb their noses at her unchangeable teachings on contraception, abortion, assisted suicide, and same-sex marriage. Here is something even worse — a feminist Sister of Mercy, a Reverend Mother Libertine, who defends the entire gamut of sexual activity outside of marriage. In Just Love, Margaret Farley caps three decades of teaching ethics at Yale Divinity School with a proposed new "framework for Christian sexual ethics." I leave it to the reader of this review to determine how Christian, never mind how Catholic, it is...
Margaret then proposes a "framework" for sexual ethics in which Catholic principles related to chastity are to be replaced by new miasmic guidelines like "autonomy" and "relationality." One of the wrongs she castigates here is the "negligence regarding what we know we must do for sex to be ‘safe sex.'" She speaks at length of "mutuality" as a norm, but notes that mutuality differs "in kind and degree" in a one-night stand, a short fling, or love with commitment. One waits in vain for her to say that such sexual activity is sinful. No, there's not a single defense of chastity in this book. Sr. Margaret even refuses to say that teenage "hooking up," which she defines as sex "without any relationship," is gravely immoral. In fact, all her warnings are in the opposite direction — against a return to what she calls "sexual taboo morality." She fears that teenagers might be rebuked for "hooking up" and then end up with a sense of "shame and guilt." Heaven forbid!...
What is most shocking in this book is that the author, a practical apostate, insists on bringing up "the presence of God" and the "sacramental dimension" of human sexuality — yes, sacramental — in the context of endorsing all this gravely immoral sexual activity. There's a blasphemous ring to her quotations from our Lord's Sermon on the Mount (as if it were on her side) in a section approving of impurity as "liberty of spirit." After all, it was in the Sermon on the Mount that our divine Savior declared, "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God." Sr. Margaret, on the contrary, sees the pure of heart as narrow-minded and wants to liberate everyone from "zealous moralisms." So when she says that the "ideal" for Christians is to "integrate" their "multiple loves" into the "love of God," one is tempted to ask, What god? Who else but Satan would inspire contempt for alleged "pinch-faced virtue"?...
Finally, at the climactic point of the book comes her full-throated defense of homosexual relationships. She begins by saying that her "ethical framework" for heterosexuals applies equally to homosexuals, so she returns briefly to her "four sources" for sexual ethics. First, she deconstructs every biblical verse that forbids sodomy: when in Leviticus it is forbidden for a man to lie with another man as with a woman (18:22; 20:13), this is about idolatry; when Genesis speaks of the sin of Sodom (19:1-29), this is about inhospitality; and when St. Paul condemns sodomy (Rom. 1:26-27), this is about heterosexuals going against what's natural for themselves. From this farrago of nonsense she draws what she calls the "modest conclusion" that there is "no solid ground" in Scripture for any "absolute prohibition" of homosexual acts. And even if there were, she smirks, how "relevant" would such "isolated texts" be to our life today?..
What Margaret Farley has performed in Just Love is a more egregious act of apostasy than those of the self-proclaimed "Catholic" politicians and judges who have promoted the Culture of Death. Alas, I haven't heard of any bishop advising Reverend Mother Libertine not to approach the Blessed Sacrament without first publicly repenting. I haven't heard of her religious order, the Sisters of Mercy, showing her the door. I haven't heard a cry of outrage from Catholic academe at the gross sexual immorality advanced in her book.
On the contrary, a chorus of praise is rising from her Catholic admirers in academe — among them Brian Linnane, S.J., president of Loyola College, Maryland, who praises her for creating an alternative sexual ethic without the Church's emphasis on "abstinence"; Fr. Charles Curran, who praises her for having opposed for years "papal teachings on contraception, sterilization, divorce, homosexuality, and direct abortion"; and Lisa Sowle Cahill, a theology professor at Boston College who hails Sr. Margaret for subjecting the Vatican to a "critique from the perspective of gender equality." These are only three of a line-up of Catholics who have contributed essays to a festschrift in her honor, A Just and True Love: Feminism at the Frontiers of Theological Ethics, published by the University of Notre Dame, with an enthusiastic blurb on the back from James F. Keenan, S.J. If the Vatican and the U.S. bishops ever decide to excommunicate the self-styled "Catholics" who ride brazenly on the bandwagon of the Culture of Death, is it too much to ask that they start with libertine theologians like Sr. Margaret Farley?
