Justice has a lot to do with it: Timothy Luke Johnson's Review of Margaret Farley's' Just Love

Timothy Luke Johnson

Sr. Margaret Farley, RSM and her book Just Love

Commonweal provides Timothy Luke Johnson's 2007 Review of Margaret Farley's' Just Love

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/whats-justice-got-do-it-0 

January 26, 2007

Books

What's Justice Got to Do with It?

Just Love  A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics  Margaret Farley Continuum, $29.95, 336 pp.

Luke Timothy Johnson

At a time of high-volume recrimination, when all that seem to count are loud opinions on specific hot-button topics, few things require more boldness than quietly to propose a “framework for Christian sexual ethics” that asks readers to ponder basic principles rather than rush to precipitous conclusions. And few people are better qualified to offer such an unexpected proposal than Margaret Farley, the Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School since 1971.

As a feminist, a Roman Catholic, and a religious (Sister of Mercy) teaching ethics in a liberal university during an era of ideological and ecclesiastical turmoil over sexuality, Farley could scarcely have hoped to avoid public controversy. And indeed, at times she has become a point of polarization, honored by fellow theologians and excoriated by bloggers for such positions as her stated belief that homosexuality “can be a way of embodying responsible human love and sustaining Christian friendship.” To the many students who worked with her over the past thirty-five years, however, and to those who have read her books and articles, Farley is best known for her largeness of spirit and for the demanding intelligence she brings to her teaching and writing.

Her new book exudes those qualities. In Just Love, Farley seeks not so much to persuade as to invite readers to a way of thinking that can move the conversation about sexual morality forward. Her project is constructive and, like any foundation-laying, requires patience. I must confess that in my own reading, I grew a little impatient with the space given to spadework, and felt the urge to page ahead. Yet serious readers will do well to pay attention from start to finish. Farley’s manner is academic but not obscure, and once readers grow comfortable with it, they will reap the benefits of wisdom gleaned from decades of teaching and scholarship.

In her introduction, Farley ties the need for a new framework for sexual ethics to the explosive growth in knowledge in our time. The natural sciences have tremendously complicated our notions of gender and sexuality, even as history and the social sciences have revealed the partial character of our prior normative discourse concerning what is “natural” and “proper.” Failing to work at a framework capacious and sturdy enough to encompass such new knowledge is intellectually irresponsible, Farley suggests; and bearing authentic Christian witness requires intellectual responsibility.

The next three sections of Just Love challenge Christian ethics to come to grips with a new cognitive situation. “The Questions and Their Past” takes up the complexities of sex, morality, and history in theories of interpretation from Foucault to evolutionary psychology, and charts the evolution of sexual ethics in the West, sketching normative positions from Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment and adding recent medical perspectives. Farley simplifies these large topics in an appropriate and illuminating fashion. In “Difficult Crossings: Diverse Traditions,” she briefly surveys the impact of cross-cultural realities, outlining the theoretical issues involved in learning from other cultures, and offering data from the South Seas, traditional African culture, Hinduism, and Islam. Finally, she gives explicit attention to “Sexuality and Its Meanings,” beginning with how the body matters, moving to whether gender matters, and concluding with sexuality and its meanings.

Up to this point all the attention in Just Love has been on the “is,” with no element of “ought,” and some readers may grow restless with the apparent lack of a normative argument. Farley tests us further by turning in chapter 5 to still another apparently theoretical discussion. First, she elaborates on her decision to locate Christian sexual ethics within the framework of justice, instead of a number of available alternatives. Second, she discusses the sources for Christian sexual ethics, adopting a form of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. (Her understandings of Scripture and tradition are those of a moderate liberal, but her conception of reason and experience is more expansive than one might expect: reason, for example, clearly includes “secular disciplines of knowledge,” and experience seems to embrace a wide range of “contemporary experience.”) Finally, she defends “just love,” rather than simply “love,” as the proper approach to sexual ethics. Love may sound nobler, but it is also more elusive; justice may seem minimalist, but without it love is empty.

In chapter 6, “Framework for a Sexual Ethic: Just Love,” Farley turns to her understanding of justice, focusing on “the concrete reality of persons” and the “obligating features of personhood.” She lists seven norms that must be met in order for decisions about sexual acts and dispositions to be just: no unjust harm; free consent; mutuality; equality; commitment; fruitfulness; and social justice. This rich chapter concludes with Farley’s thoughts on how “just love” works as a Christian ethic, as well as a human and social one. Finally, all these discussions come to a focus in the closing chapter, “Patterns of Relationship: Contexts for Just Love.” The three patterns are “marriage and family,” “same-sex relationships,” and “divorce and remarriage.” For each of these complex questions, Farley summons resources arrayed in the opening chapters and moves toward normative judgments.

To criticize Farley’s “opinions” on any of these difficult questions would be to betray the entire spirit of her project, which emphasizes not particular conclusions, but the process of reasoning responsibly and well toward a conclusion. Nor would it be to the point to complain that Just Love does not cover everything that comes under the heading of sexual ethics, or even that it fails to cover adequately its own examples; all Farley’s topics were deployed to illustrate thinking justly within the framework she has established.

Instead, I direct my criticisms to the framework itself. Some elements of the ethical structure built up in Just Love are less clearly developed than they might be, especially in light of the “Christian” dimension of the book’s subtitle. Farley pays little attention to the ecclesial character of sexual ethics. How does the church’s standard of holiness with respect to the body come into play? How might the church as a community play a role in discerning appropriate codes of personal behavior? And how can this discerning activity (which properly puts emphasis on human experience) negotiate the often difficult declarations of the magisterium? The last is a special issue for Catholics, to be sure, but it is scarcely foreign to other ecclesial bodies struggling with sexual ethics.

Farley’s effort to describe a person-based sexual ethics that moves easily to a sexual ethics based in justice is certainly consonant with Christian identity; but is it distinctive to Christian identity, or does it arise from what is distinctive in Christian commitment? The answer may be that it need not be distinctively Christian in order to be fully Christian, but I would like to see the point argued more fully. Finally, while I appreciate that Scripture is but one of the resources available for normative moral discourse, I would have appreciated a more robust engagement with both the problems and possibilities offered by biblical witness; Farley’s method as a scholar ends up giving more space to the Samoans than to Scripture.

These questions, I want to make clear, arise from a deeply sympathetic reading of Farley’s argument. I consider Just Love an important resource and spur for further collaboration among Christians and others on the knotty issues of sexual ethics. Throughout her book, Farley evinces the sort of intellectual modesty that comes from great learning and an open mind. She recognizes how little we actually know about many of the issues on which we confidently make normative judgments, and I appreciate her insistence on our need to know “what is the case” before we proclaim “what must be so.” Such openness to other cultures (and to science) is not a function of political correctness but of theological appropriateness. Farley insists that the mystery of human embodiedness demands not only respect at the moral level, but also modesty at the cognitive one.

An example of how respect and modesty can make a difference for normative discourse within Christianity is the splendid discussion in Just Love of intersex persons, those born with both male and female sexual organs. Farley reveals how impoverished our Western world’s two-gender-only understanding of humans is when compared with the recognized place of “third gendered” persons in some cultures. She discusses how the obsession with “fixing” intersex children into an acceptable gender, through surgery and socialization, leads to numerous problems among the “fixed.” The lesson here is that we should not be impatient with what we do not understand. Farley notes that even if only a tiny fraction of the world’s population is born in this condition, it is still a massive number of bodies from which God wants us to learn something concerning what is or is not “according to nature.” Here Farley’s argument that the moral issue is not love but justice makes a great deal of sense.

Just Love does not provide all the answers concerning sexual ethics. But it does lay out a serious and solid framework for thinking about them. It is perhaps too much to hope that this fine effort can escape the sort of polarized responses that the temper of the times seems to elicit.

It Costs To Raise A Child! Kids, Thank Mom and Dad!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304898704577482573164332632.html?mod=ITP_pageone_1

Parents and would-be parents might be relieved to hear that last week's widely reported government figure estimating the cost of raising a child—around $300,000 over the first 17 years for middle-income, two-parent families—is, according to several economists, wide of the mark.
The bad news is it may be a severe underestimate. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's report leaves two things out of account. For a start, it doesn't reflect unpaid time spent on parenting, including income forgone by parents who cut back on work hours to care for their children.

Plus, the hit to parents' wallets doesn't end when the child turns 18, as the parents often still provide housing and food as well as pay for college. These could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional costs. "The real costs of raising a child for a moderate-income family"—including forgone income, college for those who attend, and the so-called opportunity cost of not investing the money—"would be closer to $900,000 to age 22 than the reported $300,000 expenditures to age 18," says John Ward, an economist and the president of John Ward Economics, based in Prairie Village, Kan., which consults on legal disputes for plaintiffs and defendants.
(The $300,000 estimate takes into account expected inflation. In 2011 dollars, the price tag for a middle income family is $234,900.)
USDA economist Mark Lino, chief author of the annual study, acknowledges the report excludes college and forgone income. These expenses and others after a child turns 18, he says, typically aren't included in calculating state guidelines for child-support and foster-care payments—a principal use of the report.

The Numbers Guy blog

• The Parental Price Tag

"We have traditionally only looked at direct, out-of-pocket expenditures," he says.
The USDA numbers represent how much parents spend on their children, and not necessarily how much they should spend, which Dr. Lino says would be "very subjective." His staff derives its spending data from the federal Consumer Expenditure Survey, produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, assigning child expenses in various categories to households including children.
Since the first USDA report, in 1960, the data and approach have evolved. As the nation's farming population has declined, the report no longer breaks out spending on farms, though it includes separate estimates for rural areas and urban areas in different parts of the country.
In 2008, Dr. Lino's staff made two broader shifts that pulled the estimate in different directions. Pushing the figure higher, the USDA began including in its estimate of child-care and education costs only households that bore such costs. Previously, it averaged in households without direct expenses for child care and education as zeros. The change led to an increase in the cost estimate of 33% for the category.

Enlarge Image

Reuters

The hit to parents' wallets doesn't end when the child turns 18. Here, students and parents at a preschool in Golden, Colo., in May.

A change in calculating housing expenses had the opposite effect. Before 2008, each child was assigned the same share of housing costs as any other member of the household. Since then, the cost per child has been set at the marginal cost of an additional bedroom, lowering the housing cost by between 22% and 45%, depending on the region.
The education cost would be far higher if college were included, even accounting for children who don't attend college, pay for it themselves or attend low-priced institutions. Several economists, including Jane Venohr, a research associate at the Denver-based Center for Policy Research think tank who studies child support, say the USDA's approach, by cutting off at age 18, is consistent with most states' child-support guidelines. She adds, however, that guideline details vary widely across the country, and that most states don't base their guidelines entirely on the USDA estimate.
Lonnie Berger, associate professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says post-18 expenditures matter in adding up all costs to parents. Given the prolonged dependency of many adult children in the current economy, "ideally, such an accounting would extend at least through the early to mid 30s," Prof. Berger says.
Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, argued in her 2008 book "Valuing Children" that forgone wages should be included in the cost of raising children. She found that parents' time cost is larger, on average, than direct spending, at least until children reach age 12. The best explanation of why time cost hasn't been included, she says, is that "we still don't have the data we need to provide really accurate estimates."
Even the federal American Time Use Survey, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, doesn't directly measure how much time all adults in a household are spending caring for their children.
Lest this all sound like a dismal accounting of child-rearing by the dismal science, Prof. Berger says the cost approach excludes the many benefits of having children, not all of them quantifiable, such as happiness and personal satisfaction. Cost estimates such as the USDA's exclude "any intrinsic benefit that parents realize from child rearing, which would be extremely difficult to monetize," Prof. Berger says.
It should be remembered that parents may also get tangible returns from their adult children in time, such as financial resources and caregiving, Prof. Berger adds.

Don't Bite The Hands that Made You: Why Attack Nuns?

The Catholic Church's ahistorical attack on nuns

June 18, 2012|By Farah Stockman

 

http://articles.philly.com/2012-06-18/news/32300134_1_nuns-vatican-ii-religious-orders

 

In 1899, a contingent of nuns journeyed into the malarial forests of southern Africa to set up missionary schools. They mastered the clicking language of the Ndebele tribe, baked communion bread in brick ovens they built themselves, and steered clear of the subject of monogamy so as not to enrage the polygamous local chief.  

 

In 1911, another group of sister-pioneers set sail for the islands of Fiji to run a clinic for lepers. In 1929, nuns in black habits rode a steamship up the Yangtze River into the heart of China, braving insufferable heat, flying termites, and warring generals.

 

Without these extraordinary women, the Catholic Church would never have been able to spread its teachings around the globe or staff its unwieldy empire. So the Vatican's denunciation of the largest group of American nuns for "radical feminist" ideas is not only shockingly out of touch with the modern world, but also willfully blind to the church's history.

 

Long before Betty Friedan kicked off the modern feminist movement, nuns were earning medical degrees and running complex institutions. Just look at the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, founded in 1804 to educate impoverished girls. When a bishop forbade them to expand their work, they refused to obey and were kicked out of France. They relocated to Namur, Belgium, and went on to build schools in 17 countries.

It's not surprising that religious orders attracted such women. For centuries, the convent was the only respectable place for girls who aspired to travel and make a difference.

Eventually, the women's-rights movement gave young women the chance to work in social justice outside the church. That's one reason the number of American nuns plummeted. But the lack of respect for nuns in an all-male church hierarchy also played a role.

In the early 1960s, Vatican II gave nuns wide latitude to go out into the world and perform good works. Some joined the civil rights movement. Others protested the Vietnam War.

But skittish men simultaneously reined them in. The archbishop of Los Angeles insisted on dictating nuns' bedtimes, prayer hours, and reading, leading to an infamous 1970 standoff that prompted more than 300 sisters to break with the church.

If the Vatican insists on punishing nuns — the recent reprimand accuses them of focusing too much on poverty and not enough on the church's teachings on homosexuality — we could see a similar showdown. Maybe the men of the Vatican prefer a smaller, "purer" church reminiscent of the Middle Ages. But what message does this send to everybody else?

Are we really supposed to believe that strong-willed nuns are more dangerous to Catholicism than child-molesting priests? That crusades against masturbation and gay marriage are more important than helping the poor? It's hard to imagine that Jesus would agree.

The Vatican has been on the wrong side of history before. Luckily, the church's vibrant community has a way of self-correcting with time. Two hundred years ago, Julie Billiart, the foundress of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, was a persona non grata in France. Today, she is a saint.

Farah Stockman writes for the Boston Globe.

Why we still need the catholic church. Michael Bayer

Why we (still) need the Catholic Church

By Michael Bayer

Laura DeRosa of Mission Viejo, center, prays at the Mission Basilica in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. on Sunday, Nov. 27, 2011. (Cindy Yamanaka, - AP)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/why-we-still-need-the-catholic-church/2012/06/14/gJQALc62cV_blog.html

There is a scene from the second season of “The West Wing,” in which the deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman, is debating the merits of a bill with his law school buddy-turned-congressman from across the aisle. The fictitious bill in question is modeled after the actual 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, and Josh proceeds to rattle off some of the more pejorative statements made about homosexuality by the congressman’s colleagues in the days leading up to the vote, before adding, “Matt… you’re gay!” His friend calmly acknowledges both the ugliness of the remarks and the truth of his own orientation, prompting a nearly apoplectic Josh to demand, “How can you be a member of this party?”
The congressman then articulates a creedal-type profession of the party platform he espouses, including a belief in limited government, strong national defense, and the private sector as locus of job growth. He concludes that his membership in the party doesn’t have to be reduced to that one particular issue. “It doesn’t have to be all about that.”
As a lifelong Catholic who has worked for the church in some form or another since high school, I am constantly reminded of this scene. I currently serve as a youth minister here in D.C., and many of my daily conversations with friends follow a similar course. Disaffected peers, like Josh, demand to know, “How can you be a member of this church? This church that refuses to ordain women, that condemns contraception, that has perpetrated systemic cover-ups of child abuse?”
Recent events like the censure of a prominent American theologian, clashes with the Obama administration over the HHS mandate, and the Vatican-instituted overhaul of religious sisters have only intensified these conversations, providing me with a unique opportunity to offer my own profession of faith. And it begins with Scripture, which conveys to me the core truths about who we are as both individual disciples and a community of faith.
I believe that the word of God was given to us that we might grow in right relationship—with ourselves, with our God, and with one another. The Greek word used most frequently for justice is dikaiosune, which scholars tell us might be translated to that term, “right relationship.” My friend Rabbi Rachel Gartner delivered a powerful sermon on Yom Kippur this past year, challenging all who heard to remember that Torah calls us to “do the hard work” that relationships require. She posited that, in this age of Facebook, when it may be easier to de-friend someone than to slog through the often difficult process of repairing that relationship, Torah has never been more relevant. So, too, does this hold true during a time of discord in our Catholic Church.
Is it possible, as some say, to follow Jesus without religion?
Community was central to Jesus’ mission, and it remains a core of his church. So often we think of Jesus’ miracles as healing persons of physical ailments like leprosy or blindness, but we do not comprehend the larger significance of this healing act. Lepers in his day were prohibited from entering the town due to their disease, and the woman he encounters at the well is there in the heat of the day because she is not welcome among those who gathered there in the cooler morning hours. In each instance where Jesus encounters a person in need of healing, the individual is transformed by being restored to fullness of community.
It is telling that, when Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, he does not instruct them to say, “My father…” but, “Our Father… Give US this day OUR daily bread.” So often I hear the refrain among my contemporaries, “I pray, but I don’t see the need to show up to church or be part of a denomination,” to which I respond with the example of Michael Phelps. Michael Phelps is, indisputably, the best swimmer in a generation. Perhaps ever. And yet, he trains with a team, despite the fact that swimming is ostensibly an individual sport. The reasoning is simple: we need a group of people to challenge us, sustain us, support us.
The same is true of the spiritual life. Imperfect though we all are, as humans, we need that community, that “team” to challenge us, support us, and sustain us during life’s myriad struggles, joys, and despairs. The community of faith we call church helps us survive a broken heart, forces us to confront the ethical implications of our consumer lifestyle, and assists us as we navigate difficult decisions like end of life care for aging parents. Moreover, members of the community compel us, by their example, to break out of the self-centeredness of our daily routines and ask how we might serve others. How we might feed the hungry, as did S.O.M.E. founder Father Horace McKenna, S.J. How we might provide shelter to the homeless, as did Sister Mary Scullion. And how we might care for the sick and orphaned, as did Father Angelo D’Agostino, S.J.
They are who we are called to be: They model discipleship in the community of faith and challenge us to do the same. As for all the news about Catholic clashes or the latest partisan church squabble-- as the congressman attested to Josh, “It doesn’t have to be all about that.”
Michael Bayer is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley and has served as campus minister at the University of San Francisco and the University of Michigan. Michael is currently the Director of Youth Ministry at St. John the Baptist in Silver Spring.

By Michael Bayer  |  03:46 PM ET, 06/14/2012

Get Rid of College Football

 
 (From left to right): Buzz Bissinger and Malcolm Gladwell argued to ban or substantially reform college football, while Tim Green and Jason Whitlock defended the sport at a May 8 debate.

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/ben_reiter/05/09/ban-college-football-debate/index.html#ixzz1xK2l00II

Why College Football Should Be Banned

The costs are high, the benefits to students are low, argues Buzz Bissinger. And academics pay the price

By BUZZ BISSINGER

 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304743704577382292376194220.html

In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.

That's because college football has no academic purpose. Which is why it needs to be banned. A radical solution, yes. But necessary in today's times.
Football only provides the thickest layer of distraction in an atmosphere in which colleges and universities these days are all about distraction, nursing an obsession with the social well-being of students as opposed to the obsession that they are there for the vital and single purpose of learning as much as they can to compete in the brutal realities of the global economy.

Photos: A Legacy of Scandal

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Associated Press

North Carolina football coach Butch Davis

Who truly benefits from college football? Alumni who absurdly judge the quality of their alma mater based on the quality of the football team. Coaches such as Nick Saban of the University of Alabama and Bob Stoops of the University of Oklahoma who make obscene millions. The players themselves don't benefit, exploited by a system in which they don't receive a dime of compensation. The average student doesn't benefit, particularly when football programs remain sacrosanct while tuition costs show no signs of abating as many governors are slashing budgets to the bone.
If the vast majority of major college football programs made money, the argument to ban football might be a more precarious one. But too many of them don't—to the detriment of academic budgets at all too many schools. According to the NCAA, 43% of the 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision lost money on their programs. This is the tier of schools that includes such examples as that great titan of football excellence, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Blazers, who went 3-and-9 last season. The athletic department in 2008-2009 took in over $13 million in university funds and student fees, largely because the football program cost so much, The Wall Street Journal reported. New Mexico State University's athletic department needed a 70% subsidy in 2009-2010, largely because Aggie football hasn't gotten to a bowl game in 51 years. Outside of Las Cruces, where New Mexico State is located, how many people even know that the school has a football program? None, except maybe for some savvy contestants on "Jeopardy." What purpose does it serve on a university campus? None.

The most recent example is the University of Maryland. The president there, Wallace D. Loh, late last year announced that eight varsity programs would be cut in order to produce a leaner athletic budget, a kindly way of saying that the school would rather save struggling football and basketball programs than keep varsity sports such as track and swimming, in which the vast majority of participants graduate.

“If you want to establish a minor league system that the National Football League pays for—which they should—that is fine.”

Part of the Maryland football problem: a $50.8 million modernization of its stadium in which too many luxury suites remain unsold. Another problem: The school reportedly paid $2 million to buy out head coach Ralph Friedgen at the end of the 2010 season, even though he led his team to a 9-and-4 season and was named Atlantic Coast Conference Coach of the Year. Then, the school reportedly spent another $2 million to hire Randy Edsall from the University of Connecticut, who promptly produced a record of 2-and-10 last season.
In an interview with the Baltimore Sun in March, Mr. Loh said that the athletic department was covering deficits, in large part caused by attendance drops in football and basketball, by drawing upon reserves that eventually dwindled to zero. Hence cutting the eight sports.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are the medical dangers of football in general caused by head trauma over repetitive hits. There is the false concept of the football student-athlete that the NCAA endlessly tries to sell, when any major college player will tell you that the demands of the game, a year-round commitment, makes the student half of the equation secondary and superfluous. There are the scandals that have beset programs in the desperate pursuit of winning—the University of Southern California, Ohio State University, University of Miami and Penn State University among others.
I can't help but wonder how a student at the University of Oregon will cope when in-state tuition has recently gone up by 9% and the state legislature passed an 11% decrease in funding to the Oregon system overall for 2011 and 2012. Yet thanks to the largess of Nike founder Phil Knight, an academic center costing $41.7 million, twice as expensive in square footage as the toniest condos in Portland, has been built for the University of Oregon football team.
Always important to feed those Ducks.
I actually like football a great deal. I am not some anti-sports prude. It has a place in our society, but not on college campuses. If you want to establish a minor league system that the National Football League pays for—which they should, given that they are the greatest beneficiaries of college football—that is fine.
Call me the Grinch. But I would much prefer students going to college to learn and be prepared for the rigors of the new economic order, rather than dumping fees on them to subsidize football programs that, far from enhancing the academic mission instead make a mockery of it.
—Mr. Bissinger is the author of "Friday Night Lights." He will participate in a debate Tuesday evening at New York University, sponsored by Intelligence Squared, in which he and Malcolm Gladwell will argue that college football should be banned. (See Ideas Calendar) Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the University of Oklahoma as Oklahoma University.

A version of this article appeared May 5, 2012, on page C3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Why College Football Should Be Banned.

TIME MAGAZINE: The Catholic Contraction

The Catholic Contraction

History — and statistics — is on the side of Catholic women. So why is the church leadership attacking its own? 

 

By Tim Padgett | June 8, 2012

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/06/08/the-catholic-contraction/?iid=biz-main-mostpop2#ixzz1xGQEUGQy

If you want some perspective on just how benighted the Roman Catholic Church looks today on the subject of women, consider Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard was a German Benedictine nun in the 12th century and a leading feminist writer of her time. But even though that time was the 1100s, the Vatican rarely hassled her for asserting that men and women are equal — that God’s true nature, in fact, is maternal — or that nonprocreative sexual pleasure is O.K.

In the 21st century, however, Hildegard would no doubt receive the same censure that Sister Margaret Farley is facing this week after the Vatican denounced her book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. Farley, a Sisters of Mercy nun, a retired Yale divinity professor and a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, condones practices that have been morally acceptable to most U.S. and European Catholics for quite a while, including divorce, homosexuality, nonprocreative intercourse and masturbation. But Rome’s doctrinal bulldogs are sternly reminding her that those acts are “disordered,” “deviant” and “depraved.”

(MORE: A Nun’s Guide to Sex: The Latest Vatican Scandal)

Sadly, it’s the church that’s looking unhinged these days. The Vatican was apparently just warming up in 2010 when it declared, astonishingly, that ordaining females into the all-male Catholic priesthood would be a “grave sin” on par with even pedophilia. Since then, as if scapegoating women for the escalating dissent among Catholics toward its hoary dogma, the church seems to have embarked on a misogynist’s crusade. Its legal assault on the Obama Administration’s requirement that Catholic institutions like colleges and hospitals make contraception available to female employees as part of their health coverage is, ultimately, less about religious freedom than about women’s freedom. Then there’s the U.S. bishops’ absurd probe of whether the Girl Scouts are selling feminist theology as well as fattening thin mints — and Rome’s accusation of “radical feminism” within the Leadership Conference on Women Religious (LCWR), which represents most of the U.S. nuns doing genuinely Christ-inspired work with the poor and the sick.

Still, nuns from Hildegard to Farley have always been able to focus on the light of the faith they follow and look beyond the shadows of the hierarchy they tolerate. Examples like theirs make it easier for Catholics like me to remain Catholics. So it’s unsurprising that the LCWR has all but thumbed its nose at the Vatican this month or that Farley coolly told the Vatican this week that it “misrepresents … the aims of my work.”

Yet there may be another reason the nuns aren’t buckling. For once, the numbers are on their side — and they may realize that the hierarchy needs them more than they need it. Catholicism has certainly lost followers amid the clerical sexual-abuse scandals and the laity’s resulting reassessment of the church and its retro teachings. The U.S. Catholic population is down 5% since 2000, to 59 million, according to the Glenmary Research Center in Nashville, while the share of Catholics in Ireland who attend Mass has plummeted from 82% in 1981 to just 35% today — including a paltry 14% in the capital, Dublin.

But the sudden drop in the number of female Catholics — the backbone of most parishes, though the church has taken them for granted for millennia — gives the nuns real leverage. In olden days, Catholic women didn’t feel as excluded by an all-male priesthood because the church offered leadership roles rarely available to them in the secular world, like hospital and business administration. Today, however, many if not most Catholic women just see an institution that rates them as second-class. And as Patricia Wittberg, a Sisters of Charity nun and sociologist at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis wrote this year in the Jesuit weekly America, they’re increasingly opting out.

It began, Wittberg notes, with American female Catholics of Generation X, born between 1962 and 1980, who “barely equaled their male counterparts in regular Mass attendance and were significantly more likely” to disagree with the church on matters like women’s ordination, homosexuality and premarital sex. It gets worse with female Millennials, born between 1981 and 1995, who according to Wittberg’s research are more likely than men to say they never attend Mass — “the first generation of American Catholic women for whom this is so,” she says — and whose distrust of the church is even more pronounced. Which helps explain why, for the first time ever, fewer U.S. Catholic women than men are entering religious life. In Philadelphia, where a jury is now deliberating in a major clerical sex-abuse case, 173 men prepared for the Catholic priesthood in 2010, while only 30 women prepared to be nuns.
Logic would thus dictate that it’s counterproductive for the church to persecute nuns and vilify legitimate and responsible female interests like contraception. But this is where the Pope and his bishops are especially and stunningly divorced from reality. They’re convinced — just as the 17th century church was certain it could make the heliocentric universe go away by threatening to torture Galileo — that by reminding Catholic women that men wear the ecclesiastical pants, they can whip the ladies back in line and stanch Catholicism’s female exodus.

The long-term result of that delusion could be catastrophic for Catholicism. Driving out dissenters won’t purify the church, as Catholic conservatives so tiresomely insist; it will simply petrify it. Incredibly, the church leaders reading Hildegard of Bingen nine centuries ago understood that better than the hierarchy watching Sister Farley does today.

MORE: There Is No ‘War on Religion’

 

Padgett is TIME's Miami and Latin America bureau chief. The views expressed are solely his own.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/06/08/the-catholic-contraction/?iid=biz-main-mostpop2#ixzz1xGQ53hGP

"Masturbation is So Important"

Crazy days.  We've been at war for over a decade and spent over $3 trillion killing people.  Poverty grows world wide, and unemployment stands at over 8% in the USA.  Global climate change threatens human life on earth... and we're talking about masturbation.  John 11:35 is applicable here.  Fr. Rick

 ******************************************

 
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/catholic-theologians-are-divided-into-camps-on-masturbation-marriage-and-other-church-teachings/2012/06/08/gJQAa1LIOV_print.html
Catholic theologians are divided into camps on sexuality, marriage and other church teachings

By Michelle Boorstein, Friday, June 8, 4:13 PM

Until Monday, the go-to event at this weekend’s annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of Americawas titled “Sacramental-Liturgical Theology Since Vatican II: The Dialectic of Meaning and Performance.”
But that was before the nun sex book.
That’s shorthand now for the writings of Sister Margaret Farley, a 70-something theological heavyweight, whose book, “Just Love” was censured by the Vatican this week for its empathy toward same-sex marriage, masturbation and divorce, among other activities totally forbidden by Catholic teaching.
Now the must-attend event for members of the world’s largest group of theologians, is an an interview with Farley, the group’s past president and a matriarch of feminist theologians.
Catholic sexual ethics, like everything else in American Catholicism — and perhaps America as a whole these days — is divided into two galaxies.
There's the Farley-like camp at the Society, with more than 1,300 members, which has generally embraced more open, liberal interpretations of Catholic sexual ethics. They long ago okayed papal no-nos like premarital sex and same-sex relationships, and are more focused now on things like creating stable families led by equal partners and the impact of toy marketing and media on girls’ moral values.
Then there’s masturbation. While banned by the church, Farley wrote, the practice is neither inherently good, or bad.
“Self-pleasuring,” Farley said, can help or harm “well-being or the liberty of spirit” — it depends. Women, in particular, she says “have found great good in self-pleasuring ... something many had not experienced or even known about” with husbands and lovers.
“In this way, it could be said that masturbation serves relationships rather than hindering them.”
Her thinking was in keeping with that of many of her liberal colleagues.
“Younger Catholic scholars are seeing a big divorce rate, a hook-up culture. [But] they aren’t on the bandwagon of condemning. They just want to give people more sense of direction," said Lisa Sowle Cahill, a Boston College theologian who is interviewing Farley for the Friday night talk.
Cahill added, rather sarcastically: “But some people would rather talk about masturbation, which is so much more important.”
More conservative thinkers join the much-smaller Academy of Catholic Theology or Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.
“I don’t belong and I don’t know of conservative theologians who do. We are definitely not welcome there,” Janet Smith, a prominent moral theologian at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, said of the St. Louis event.
Conservatives theologians argue that Catholic sexual ethics should not change with the times. Ethical behavior must also be judged differently in a sexual relationship than in other relationships, they say. The relationship must be between a man and a woman who are married, who don’t use contraception and who view sex as a means for procreation.
The good of sexuality comes from the fact that it bonds two people and is tied to baby-making, said Eduardo J. Echeverria, a philosophy professor at Sacred Heart seminary who writes about sexual ethics.
Masturbation violates both those things, he said, and can lead to using pornography or helping someone avoid fixing any sexual problems in their marriage.
The fact that it feels good (or can!) is meaningless, he said. “Adultery can produce pleasure, so can pedophilia. ... Human sexuality has a nature, and it’s toward union and the good of the other.”
While the more liberal sexual ethicists, like Farley, see their role as challenging official teaching to evolve with the times, traditionalists say being a Catholic theologian is about “trying to be faithful to what the church teaches ... and to explore the content of revelation,” Echeverria said.
Theologians, Echeverria said, are divided deeply — like Catholics in general — over questions of whether scripture is the real and immutable word of God. What does it mean to be a committed Christian?
What gets people like him, he said, is that the Theological Society-types barely address church teachings or people supportive of church teachings in their arguments.
“It’s as if intelligent people can’t really believe what the church teaches,” Echeverria said. “There are all these [huge theologians in the past] who wanted to be faithful to the mind of the church, and it’s as if, ‘We don’t bother to read these people.”
Farley, who has been challenging church teachings on the male-only priesthood and abortion for decades, is an author favored by liberals. On the right, the celebrity theologian is Christopher West, who used to do marriage preparation classes for the Washington Archdiocese and runs seminars and chats on the radio about Pope John Paul II’s landmark “Theology of the Body.”
Meanwhile the censure by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith continued Thursday to elevate Farley far beyond theological circles. Her book, which came out in 2006, remained in the top 20 bestsellers on Amazon, above “The Hunger Games" box set but below "Eat to Live.” That's about 200,000 spots higher than where it sat before the censure was announced.
“Have they seen ‘Footloose’ at the Vatican? Jeez,” said Rocco Palmo, a popular blogger who writes about the Vatican and the U.S. clergy. Meaning: Forbidden fruit tastes better.
In St. Louis, the Theological Society’s board on Thursday approved a statement in support of Farley, who has been comfortable in the center of controversial sexual and gender storms for decades.
The board is “especially concerned,” its statement read, about the Vatican’s view of the role of theology.
The notification by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “risks giving the impression that there can be no constructive role in the life of the Church for works of theology that 1) give voice to the experience and concerns of ordinary believers, 2) raise questions about the persuasiveness of certain official Catholic positions, and 3) offer alternative theological frameworks as potentially helpful contributions to the authentic development of doctrine. ”
While many won’t be in St. Louis this weekend, conservative sexual ethicists have had their own flurry of activity since the announcement of the notification, the first from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in five years.
Colorado theologian E. Christian Brugger wrote a piece entitled “Three Cheers for the CDF.” Others zapped around critical reviews from when Farley’s book debuted in 2006. This week moral theologian William E. May called Farley’s work “atrocious” and said she is arrogant.
“People have gone into their own their own enclaves,” Cahill said.

© The Washington Post Company

Donahue "Cup or Chalice?"

Cup or Chalice?

The Large Implications of a Small Change

John R. Donahue

http://commonwealmagazine.org/cup-or-chalicehttp://commonwealmagazine.org/cup-or-chalice

Six months after the imposition of the new English edition of the Roman Missal, the volume of dissatisfaction has moderated. People seem resigned to the wooden and literal translations (“people of good will,” “enter under my roof”), archaic vocabulary (“dewfall,” “consubstantial,” “oblation”), and inflated language of prayer (“holy and unblemished,” “graciously grant,” “paying their homage”). Such language, so different from the plainspoken words of Jesus in prayer and parable, is in contrast to the directive of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican II: “In this restoration [of the liturgy], both texts and rites should be drawn up so that they express more clearly the holy things which they signify; the Christian people, so far as possible, should be enabled to understand them with ease and to take part in them fully, actively, and as befits a community.” We have also become accustomed to hearing presiders stumble over the convoluted syntax of the prayers and watching them hurriedly turning pages as they wend their way through the labyrinthine new missals. Yet, there is one new expression that involves a significant translation error with serious implications for a proper understanding of the Last Supper as a Passover meal, along with implications for continued Jewish-Christian understanding. In the final analysis, it enshrines poor pastoral theology in the Sunday liturgy.

 “Traduttore, Traditore”

All translators are familiar with the caution that translations often distort or even betray the nuances of the original language. This is dramatically true in the substitution of the term “chalice” for “cup” in the words of institution in the Eucharistic prayer from the 1970 missal approved by Pope Paul VI:

When supper was ended he took the cup [chalice].
Again he gave you thanks and praise,
Gave the cup [chalice] to his disciples, and said:

Take this, all of you and drink from it;
This is the cup [chalice] of my blood,
The blood of the new and everlasting covenant.
It will be shed for you and for all
So that sins may be forgiven.
Do this in memory of me.

In the Greek original of all the New Testament accounts of the Last Supper, after the blessing of the bread, Jesus takes a cup (potērion) and says that this is the blood of the new covenant (Mark and Matthew), or “this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke) and “this cup is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Cor 11:25). Though Hellenistic Greek had a word—kylix (the basis of the Latin calix)—that suggests a larger ceremonial vessel often used in religious rites, the New Testament authors chose potērion, the normal term for an ordinary drinking cup in daily life.

When St. Jerome translated the New Testament from Greek to Latin he chose the Latin term calix (from which “chalice” derives) to translate potērion, but he did not intend it to mean a liturgical vessel. In both the secular Latin of the time and in Jerome’s translation of the Scriptures, the term calix meant primarily an ordinary drinking cup. In Matt 10:42 Jesus says, “And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because he is a disciple—amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.” While the original Greek has potērion for “cup” of cold water, the Latin translation reads “calicem aquae frigidae.” Given the context it would be absurd to translate this “a chalice of cold water.” Similarly, to translate “my cup overflows” in Psalm 23:5 (Vulgate 22:5) as “my chalice overflows” would be ludicrous.

Although there were early translations of the Bible into English beginning with Venerable Bede, John Wycliffe (1328–84) is credited with the first complete translation of the Latin Vulgate, and here the translation of Jesus’ action over the wine (Matt 27:26) reads “And he took the cuppe,” while the earliest English translation of Mark 14:23 from the Greek, by William Tyndale (1494–1536), reads, “And he toke the cup gave thankes and gave it to them.” Simply put, in neither Jerome’s translation of the Greek into Latin nor early translations of the Latin into English nor the early Greek translations into English was “chalice” treated as a proper translation of the words of Jesus at the Last Supper. “Chalice” was first substituted for “cup” in the Catholic Douay-Rheims translation from the Latin (1582–1609), where it functioned as a post-Tridentine marker of Catholicism against Protestantism—a role it may again assume.

The Last Supper as a Passover Meal

The words of Jesus shape the context of our Eucharistic liturgy today. Jesus sends his disciples to find a place where “I may eat the Passover with my disciples” (Mark 14:12–14). The narrative of Jesus at table with the disciples is portrayed by the evangelists as a Passover meal that highlights clear elements of the traditional Jewish Passover celebration (see 1 Cor 5:7, “Christ our Paschal lamb has been sacrificed”). Though no mention is made of the central act of eating the sacrificial lamb, the blessing, breaking, and eating of the bread and the blessing and drinking of the wine have clear parallels in the Jewish feast. Again of particular concern is the rendering of potērion as “chalice.” The key point is that the liturgy describes Jesus after the supper taking a cup, giving it to the disciples, and saying,

“Take this, all of you and drink from it;
This is the cup [chalice] of my blood.”

Though scholars differ about certain details, we know the Jewish celebration of Passover involved prayers and blessings over four cups of wine, two drunk before or during the main course and two after the meal. The third cup, “the cup of blessing” after the meal, is the cup in our Eucharistic prayers today, “when supper was ended.” St. Paul notes explicitly that it was “after the meal” (1 Cor 11:24) and earlier writes, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?” (1 Cor 10:16).

The cup that Jesus drank after the meal therefore evokes memories of the Jewish Passover ritual. To call this cup a “chalice” disguises the relation of the Christian Eucharist to an anamnesis (enacted memorial) of the Paschal Meal celebrated by the Jewish Jesus as he approached his suffering and death. The events surrounding the Passion of Jesus have caused great difficulties and sorrow in Jewish-Christian relations. The suppression of the memory of the Jewishness of Jesus in the Christian Eucharist is another example of “de-Judaizing” Jesus, and will erect another barrier to appreciation of our Jewish heritage, to mutual understanding, and to a proper liturgical catechesis.

Challenges to Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Care

Among the achievements of the Second Vatican Council, especially in the Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation (Dei verbum), was a renewed focus on Scripture as, in St. Jerome’s words, “the soul of theology.” In the life of the church, people were encouraged to “gladly put themselves in touch with the sacred text itself, whether it is through the liturgy, rich in the divine Word or through devotional reading, or through instructions suitable for the purpose and other aids” (emphasis mine). In the apostolic constitution Missale Romanum (1969), Pope Paul VI noted that the “formulas of consecration have been restored to a purer form reflective of the biblical sources” (Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948–1975). In the decades since the council, through exposure to the liturgy in the vernacular and through opportunities at all levels for deepening knowledge of Scripture, Catholics have become a Bible-reading, Bible-praying church. The traditional representation of the book as the symbol of Protestantism and of the chalice as a symbol of Catholicism had virtually disappeared. Is it now making a comeback?

The introduction of the English word “chalice” at the most solemn moment of the liturgy not only obscures the original biblical and historical context of the event but also evokes an image of Jesus that distances him from the disciples of his own day and of ours. In contemporary English a “chalice” is a liturgical vessel, and people are likely to think of gold or jewel-encrusted chalices found in museums or seen in artistic portrayals. At the Last Supper, Jesus was a Jewish layman using the drinking cups of the world around him, which were to bear the deepest mystery of his life. “Chalice” obscures this transformation of the ordinary by the power of God and distances the celebration from the lives of the participants. Indeed in the new translation of the Roman Missal, the priest says “This is the chalice of my blood,” but one of the optional responses for the people is, “When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, O Lord, until you come again.” Chalices are for priests; cups for laypeople. This suggests a return to the understanding of a priest as a sacral person separated from the community rather than offering the Eucharist as a member of “the Body of Christ.” Finally, I often celebrate liturgy among parents who, like many others, are instructing young children in the meaning of the Mass. They have told me that some of the arcane language in the new translations has made their efforts to explain what Jesus was doing at the Last Supper more difficult. 

The reference to a “chalice” has proven especially confusing.

Throughout history changes in the liturgy arose from the faith and practice of the people (“from below”) and from decisions of church leaders (“from above”). I can only hope that “cup” will again rise up to replace “chalice.”

More on the Censure of Sr. Farley's book _Just Love_

Is Pleasure a Sin?

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/opinion/dowd-is-pleasure-a-sin.html 

By MAUREEN DOWD   Op-Ed Columnist  Published: June 5, 2012 407 Comments  WASHINGTON

It’s hard to say what is weirder: 

A Sister of Mercy writing about the Kama Sutra, sexual desire and “our yearnings for pleasure.”

Or the Vatican getting so hot and bothered about the academic treatise on sexuality that the pope censures it, causing it to shoot from obscurity to the top tier of Amazon.com’s best-seller list six years after it was published.

Just 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.”

Immanuel Kant, who considered masturbation “below the level of animals,” must give way to Alfred Kinsey. “It is surely the case that many women, following the ‘our bodies our selves’ movement in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, have found great good in self-pleasuring — perhaps especially in the discovery of their own possibilities for pleasure — something many had not experienced or even known about in their ordinary sexual relations with husbands or lovers,” she writes. “In this way, it could be said that masturbation actually serves relationships rather than hindering them.”

A breath of fresh air in the stultifying church, she makes the case for same-sex relationships and remarriage after divorce. “When it truly becomes impossible to sustain a marriage relationship, the obligation to do so is released,” she writes, adding, “as when in the Middle Ages a broken leg made it impossible to continue on a pilgrimage to which one had committed oneself.”

Taking on the Council of Trent and a church that has taken a stand against pleasure, Sister Farley asserts that procreation is not the only reason couples should have sex. Fruitfulness need not “refer only to the conceiving of children,” she writes. “It can refer to multiple forms of fruitfulness in love of others, care for others, making the world a better place for others” rather than just succumbing to “an égoisme à deux.”

The Vatican showed no mercy to the Sister of Mercy, proclaiming that “the deliberate use of the sexual faculty” outside of marriage or procreation, or on one’s own, is wrong; that homosexual sex acts are “deviant,” and that marriages are by and large indissoluble. Sister Farley issued a statement that she did not intend for the book to be an expression or criticism of current official Catholic teaching, and academics and the head of her order rushed to her defense.

This latest ignoble fight with a noble nun adds to the picture of a Catholic Church in a permanent defensive crouch, steeped in Borgia-like corruption and sexual scandals, lashing out at anyone who notes the obvious: They have lost track of right and wrong.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York blasted The New York Times after Laurie Goodstein wrote that, as the archbishop of Milwaukee in 2003, he authorized payments of up to $20,000 to sexually abusive priests “as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood.”

Cardinal Dolan insisted through a spokesman that it was “charity,” not “payoffs.” But if you were the parent of a boy abused by a priest who went away with 20,000 bucks, maybe “charity” is not the word that would come to mind.

Its crisis has made the church cruel. The hierarchy should read Sister Farley’s opprobrium against adults harming vulnerable children and adolescents by sexually exploiting them; respect for the individual and requirement of free consent, she says, mean that rape, violence and pedophilia against unwilling victims are never justified.

“Seduction and manipulation of persons who have limited capacity for choice because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary power, are ruled out,” she writes.

If only the church could muster that kind of clarity, rather than Dolan-style “charity.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 6, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Is Pleasure A Sin?.

Why the Catholic Church Needs Sr. Margaret Farley

Why the Catholic Church needs Margaret Farley

By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite

http://www.washingtonpost.com/susan-brooks-thistlethwaite/2011/03/16/ABkdESf_page.html

The Vatican has once again sharply criticized a nun, this time for writing on sexual ethics. The Vatican has accused Sister Margaret Farley, a member of the Sisters of Mercy religious order and professor emerita of Yale Divinity School, of publishing a book that posed “grave harm” to the faithful.
The book title? “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics.”

View Photo Gallery: In light of the Vatican’s action, a list of nuns who have become known in the broader world. Two of the Americans listed have been canonized. 

“Just Love” is a work that sets out to find “ethical guidelines and moral wisdom for our sexual lives” taking on the task of discerning issues of “character and virtue” in relationship not just to behaviors but also to the “large questions” of what human embodiment and sexual desire mean in a moral sense. (p. 15) Our sexual relations, Margaret Farley ultimately concludes, after a cross-cultural and historical exploration, must be founded on both love and justice in an integral sense. “I propose, finally, a framework that is not justice and love, but justice in loving and in the actions that flow from that love.” She seeks to help us all define a sexual ethics that is not abstract, but “morally good and just” in reality, in actual relationships. (p. 207)
If ever there were a method of moral reasoning on sexual ethics that is desperately needed in the Catholic Church today, it is the one proposed by Margaret Farley.
Perhaps it is fitting that the attack by the Vatican on Farley’s work has come just after the Sunday of Pentecost, the time when Christians celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to the apostles (Acts 2:1-4). The major spiritual gift of the Holy Spirit is wisdom. And, as noted above, the search for moral wisdom on sexual ethics is the overarching goal of Margaret Farley’s work.
The Catholic Church desperately needs to gain moral wisdom in its sexual ethics. The church around the world has been wracked by scandals over child sexual abuse, and the crisis is far from over. The Catholic Church’s continues to reject homosexual unions in marriage as one of the gifts of God’s creation and therefore good, and the full equality of women in ordination to the priesthood has not yet been achieved.
Yet, in recent months, instead of focusing on these crucial issues, the Vatican has chosen to target Dr. Margaret Farley’s work, as well as ministry of the largest umbrella group of American nuns, a group known for its work with the poor. The Vatican has subjected these nuns to investigation and criticism for “radical feminism.” These charges, the Catholic nuns have now maintained, are “unsubstantiated” and “flawed.”
This is an important moment not only for Catholics, but also for all those people of faith who care about the world-wide Catholic communion. The question really is whether, finally, the Vatican even belongs to the Catholic Church as it is emerging in this dynamic time. This was, in fact, a question considered very seriously by the Catholic Church in the 1960’s. In 1962, Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) not only to bring the Church’s message more directly into dialogue with the modern world, but also to rethink the nature of the Church, the world and the relationship between the two. During the conference, the church redefined its role; the church was now to be seen as the “People of God.”
The Vatican II concept that the church is the “People of God” continues to be important for the Catholic Church according to Fr. Richard McBrien, Crowley-O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. An important ecclesial lesson from Vatican II is that church is thus not defined as the hierarchy, or even just the clergy or the members of orders of religious. It is the community of all who are baptized. This is a rich and diverse group in terms of gender, race, class, social status, sexual orientation, ethnicity and culture.
Thus, Fr. McBrien writes, “One of the council’s most important affirmations, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, known by its Latin title as Lumen gentium, declared that charisms, or gifts of the Holy Spirit, are available to all the faithful, “of every rank” (n. 12).”
I believe that the writing of Dr. Margaret Farley, the work of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the umbrella group of 1,500 orders that represent about 80 percent of Catholic sisters in the United States, as well as that of other Catholics today working for love, justice and charity are the gifts of the Holy Spirit for the Catholic Church in this time.
The work of the Holy Spirit in bringing moral wisdom is, without a doubt, mysterious and hard to discern. But in the New Testament, love and the works of love in treating each other justly are often found together as marks of the work of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:22)
And as the prophet of the Hebrew Bible, Micah says, “What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God (Micah 6:8).