VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández has sought to distance himself from a newly resurfaced book on orgasms that he wrote in 1998, calling it a text he “certainly would not write now,” though not condemning its contents.
Speaking to Crux and InfoVaticana, Cardinal Fernández attempted to calm the international storm that spread throughout Monday after the online publication of his 1998 book “Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality.”
He attested that the book was “dropped” shortly after its publication and “never allowed it to be reprinted.”
It came into being in the first place, he said, based on his encounters with young couples “who wanted to better understand the spiritual meaning of their relationships.” Soon after publishing it, Fernández stated that “I thought it could be misinterpreted,” as it was “a youth book” that he “certainly would not write now.”
Owing to his fear of the text being “misrepresented,” Fernández stated that he was opposed to its re-emergence online in recent days: “That’s why I don’t think it’s a good thing to spread it now. In fact, I have not authorized it and it is contrary to my will.”
READ: Scandalous book on orgasms surfaces from Cardinal Fernández
As reported by LifeSite, the 1998 text is a work in which the then-Fr. Fernández compares how the “particularities of men and women in orgasm also occur in some way in the mystical relationship with God.”
Chapters 7 through 9 have been flagged by commentators as particularly offensive, owing to their graphic description of sexual intercourse. They are respectively entitled: “Male and female orgasms,” “The road to orgasm,” and “GOD in the couple’s orgasm.”
Fernández, linking the fullness of spirituality with the exercise of sexual intercourse and orgasm, examined the question “if this mystical experience, in which the entire being is taken by God, if this kind of ‘mystical orgasm’ is experienced by each person according to his or her sexuality.”
He also equated the “pleasure of orgasm” to spiritual perfection and beatitude, writing that “the pleasure of orgasm becomes a preview of the wonderful festival of love that is heaven. Because there is nothing that anticipates heaven better than an act of charity.”
Chapter 6 has additionally been a cause for concern due to its apparent depiction of an alleged erotic fantasy by a 16-year-old girl, who related the details to Fernández.
VATICAN: Below is my full working translation of Chapter 6 from Cdl. Fernández’s 1998 orgasm-centered book – “Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality” – detailing “a passionate encounter with Jesus” as reportedly told to him by a 16yr old girl.
My prior coverage on Chapters… pic.twitter.com/1VhVrXGNZM— Michael Haynes 🇻🇦 (@MLJHaynes) January 8, 2024
LifeSiteNews contacted the cardinal seeking further information about the text by way of an interview but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Among the passages highlighted by observers is a section from the end of Chapter 8 in which he appeared to cast doubts on the power of God’s grace, along with the intrinsically evil nature of homosexual actions. Fernández wrote about the inability of divine grace to assist a person from ceasing acts of homosexuality:
But this does not necessarily mean that this joyful experience of divine love, if I achieve it, will free me from all my psychological weaknesses. It does not mean, for example, that a homosexual will necessarily stop being homosexual.
Let us remember that 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.
Fernández’s efforts to drop the 1998 book have certainly been thorough. Not only was the text absent from the Vatican’s official CV introducing him as the new prefect of the Congregation (Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith, but the book is seemingly only available as an archive copy online.
However, the work is included in an archived version of his information when he was a faculty member at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina. The book is listed in the archived versions of the webpage from 2012 through 2018.
At the time Fernández wrote the text in 1998, he was holding a variety of roles, including:
- Professor of Hermeneutics and of the New Testament at the Jesus Good Shepherd seminary, in Cordoba.
- Moral theology professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina (UCA) faculty of theology.
- Professor of theological anthropology at UCA.
- Professor of eschatology at UCA.
- Professor of dogmatic theology at UCA.
Fernández has held his new role as prefect of the CDF since mid-September, and since that time an unprecedented 12 documents have been published by the Vatican’s doctrinal office, several of them raising concerns for faithful Catholics over heterodox teaching.