Cry for Me, Argentina

 

Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, prefect of the dicastery for the faith, is currently a subject of controversy for a book he wrote in 1998, now suppressed, recently discovered: Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality. It is being condemned by traditional Catholics as pornographic. 

The matter is complicated, because romantic or erotic love has always been used as a metaphor for divine love. You see this in Song of Solomon, in the Bible: 

“I am a wall, and my breasts are like towers. Thus I have become in his eyes like one bringing contentment.”

“I” in this case being the soul seeking union with God. God seeks an intimate relationship with each of us, a relationship comparable to that between a man and woman in love. But note how obviously this is a metaphoric, not a literal, statement: breasts=towers; “Like one.”

Saint John of the Cross uses similar imagery in “The Dark Night of the Soul”: 

“O, night that hast united
The lover with His beloved,
And changed her into her love.”

Again, obviously metaphor: night is personified; the unnamed lover represents love itself. 

And there is the entire Medieval tradition of “romance.” Even if commonly misconstrued, the love of the knight for his maiden is always a metaphor for divine love. The unfortunate result of this has been that, in the West, erotic love has been falsely given some of the numinousness of divine love in the popular imagination, resulting in an unfortunate and unhealthy preoccupation with finding a perfect mate and deriving some profound satisfaction from the sex act.

In Hinduism, the same point is made in the beautiful Krishna-Radha cycle: the soul is attracted to God as young girls are attracted to a handsome boy.

So Fernandez’s book might only have been more of this. Literal-minded critics were perhaps merely misunderstanding this longstanding metaphor. I had to read it for myself.

But it is not so. Granted, Fernandez and his supporters draw on this tradition, as if they are doing the same thing. But it is Fernandez who is being literal-minded. When he speaks of “love,” he means physical orgasm. He seems unaware of any other sort of love, beyond physical pleasure.

He gets specific and clinical, for example, discussing the female sex organs and how they are stimulated. And he speaks of orgasm as a sacrament: 

“If God can be present at that level of our existence, he can also be present when two human beings love each other and reach orgasm; and that orgasm, experienced in the presence of God, can also be a sublime act of worship to God. … God loves man’s happiness, therefore, it is also an act of worship to God to experience a moment of happiness.”

Nor need those two human beings be married or of opposite sexes, for this to be true: “the person [experiencing grace] can do things that are objectively sinful, without being guilty, and without losing the grace of God or the experience of his love.”

It has to be alarming that someone with such views is not only a Catholic priest, but a Bishop, a Cardinal, and actually in charge of the Holy Office, vetting the faith of the Church. It illuminates the current drive by the Vatican to approve the blessing of divorced and same sex couples.

The Vatican is no longer Catholic; or religious in any sense.