Weeks after the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) published the notorious Fiducia supplicants- the pope’s pet project that offered a framework for priests to bless same-sex couples while throwing the Roman Catholic church into chaos- Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, the prefect of the DFF and one of the architects behind the declaration, was discovered to have written several books which mix spirituality, mysticism, eroticism and explicit commentary in a way that would make even Anne Voskamp blush.
One of the books Fernández authored is Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality, which was not listed in his publishing accomplishments when Francis promoted him to prefect of the Dicastery last year,
In the book, which undeniably has bearing on the push to see priests give blessings to homosexuals, Fernández, who occupies one of the most prominent and influential positions at the Vatican, says that encountering God’s divine love doesn’t mean that homosexuals will see their sexuality redeemed and that it might not ultimately even be a problem.
“God’s grace can coexist with weaknesses and even with sins, when there is a very strong conditioning. In those cases, the person can do things that are objectively sinful, without being guilty, and without losing the grace of God or the experience of his love.”
In another chapter, Fernández reveals “an experience of love, a passionate encounter with Jesus, that a sixteen-year-old-teenager [girl] told me about,” where the girl encountered Jesus at the Sea of Galilee, bathing and lying in the sand, and how this girl kissed and caressed his entire body, head to toe, while the “virgin mary” looks on approvingly.
Finally, in a segment summarized by the CNA, the book’s final chapters focus on the human orgasm and the way it connects to “divine intimacy.”
In a chapter titled “Male and Female Orgasm,” Fernández provides an extensive, detailed description of sexual intercourse, offering his assessment of differences in male and female preferences and experiences of orgasm.However, Fernández goes on to conclude that “in the mystical experience, God touches the most intimate center of love and pleasure, a center where it does not matter much whether we are male or female.”
In the chapter “The Road to Orgasm,” Fernandez seems to suggest that the saints experienced sexual pleasure in their mystical unions with God.
“Some saints began to have inebriating experiences of God shortly after their conversion, or at the same conversion; others, like Saint Teresa of Ávila, achieved these experiences after many years of spiritual dryness. Saint Therese of Lisieux, although she felt tenderly loved by God, never had very ‘sensual’ experiences of his love, and it seems that she only achieved an overflowing and passionate joy at the moment of her death, when her face was transfigured and she said her last words: ‘I love you, oh my God, I love you!'”
Fernández at one point, describes an encounter he had with Jesus where he was “surrounded by your arms, caressed by your skin, letting me bathe in your breath, it seems to me that you are doing something new, Jesus.” and “You are not leaving my side, your arms, your skin, your heat, your shoulder that supports me are still there. But now you are entering me, you are taking over my intimacy, the deepest center of my heart. Without forcing me, without forcing me, with infinite delicacy.
In his chapter “God in the Couple’s Orgasm,” Fernández insists there can be “a kind of fulfilling orgasm in our relationship with God, which does not imply so much physical alterations, but simply that God manages to touch the soul-corporeal center of pleasure.”
Later, he concludes, “If that loving and passionate experience of the presence of God is something fulfilling, something that wonderfully harmonizes and calms our affectivity and our sensuality, then we all have at least the right to desire it.”
