Vatican Bans Book on Female Masturbation

Jun 5, 2012 Daily Beast

The Catholic Church cracks down on a nun’s book in praise of self-love.

It is no secret that the members of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are tough when it comes to the finer points of church creed. And this year, under the direction of Cardinal William Levada, they’ve been especially busy inspecting various branches of the Catholic Church. In April, they came down hard on American nuns for pushing “radical feminist themes” by focusing too much on the poor and not enough on the Church’s pet issues like opposition to same-sex marriage and the ordination of women priests. In May, they chastised the Girl Scouts for linking to groups such as Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and Oxfam, which advocate condom use to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Now, the CDF is pointing a condemnatory finger at a book called Just Love, by one Sister Margaret A. Farley, and the author’s apparently controversial take that self-love—i.e., masturbation—is just fine. The Vatican slammed the autoerotic act as “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action,” in their latest mandate released yesterday, and dating from March 30, in response to the 2006 tome. (The book’s full title is Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics.)

Farley, who is a Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale University’s Divinity School, meant for her book to give guidance on sexual mores, geared to a modern Catholic audience. Instead, the CDF said, it “has been a cause of confusion among the faithful” and that “the Congregation decided to undertake an examination following the procedure for ‘examination in cases of urgency’”—basically, a vehicle to institute a book ban. Among the CDF’s many complaints, the group says the book is dangerous reading because “it contains erroneous propositions, the dissemination of which risks grave harm to the faithful.” They go on to accuse Farley of blatantly ignoring church doctrine when it comes to masturbation, homosexual acts, and divorce.

The Vatican's doctrinal office criticized Sister Margaret A. Farley for her writings on sex and masturbation in her book "Just Love." (Right: Yale Divinity School)

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