In case you somehow missed it, last week there was an uproar over the unearthing of a book written twenty-five years ago by Cardinal Victor Manual Fernandez, prefect for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. (That’s the Roman office charged with safeguarding Catholic teaching, making Card. Fernandez the pope’s chief “doctrinal czar” over the whole Church.) Mystical Passion caused a stir over content that included graphic reflection on sexual acts and the detailed retelling of the intimate fantasy of a teenage girl, allegedly shared with then-Father Fernandez, involving our Lord.
Criticism of the book, which aimed to plumb theological connections between spiritual and sexual ecstasy, has tended to focus on the impropriety of its content and language, as well as, in deeper dives, the error of sexualizing mysticism: taking superficial resemblances between divine union and sexual climax and making them literal. The orgasm, seemingly in the younger Cardinal Fernandez’s view, is not just a (crude, earthly, infinitely insufficient) metaphor for the experiences of mystical prayer but can be a gateway to them or even, perhaps, constitutive of them.
I find myself in general agreement with the better critiques of this book’s worst parts, and I hope that Cardinal Fernandez’s recent disavowal of it goes beyond its potential to be “misunderstood” as he has said.
Beyond that, though, I think would be a shame if efforts to purify spirituality of hyper-sexualization caused us to lose sight of real and important ways in which God and sex are linked.
For example, in the ecclesial and Trinitarian metaphors for nuptial relations. Marriage, with which sex is intrinsically connected, models both the intimate self-giving and receiving of the Persons of the Trinity and the spousal love between Christ and the Church. Can you run too far in a speculative direction with these realities? Sure, but that doesn’t make them any less true in what they are.
Also, in the act of co-creation with God to make new life. In the marital act, husband and wife do reach to the heavens to call down divine fire—only, not by the experience of climactic pleasure but in the invoking and sharing of God’s proper power to create, from nothing, new human beings with immortal souls.
It is kind of interesting how, in the practices of modern sexual revolutionary figures like J.H. Noyes, Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, Aleister Crowley, H.R. Giger, and others, you can see a red thread of attempting to magnify sexual pleasure to magical or mystical levels (often by intermixing sex acts with occult rituals) while viciously rejecting procreation. Such people worked furiously to perfect and propagate onanism, contraception, abortion, and other perverse and unnatural practices because the intellect darkened by sin sets pleasure at odds with human life. And the darkest of intellects divinizes pleasure while despising the thing that does make sex a participation in the divine.