Orgasm like paradise, Fernández's porn-theology

After the 'theology' of the kiss, that of the orgasm. A book from oblivion brings to the public eye all the many shadows of the personality of the new prefect of the DDF.

It was the year 1998: Victor M. Fernández had been a priest for twelve years, a graduate in Biblical Theology at the Gregorian for ten and a Doctor of Theology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires for eight. In that year, Tucho published a book for Ediciones Dabar, entitled La Pasión Mística. Espiritualidad y Sensualidad, literally a book of 'pornology', in which Tucho lingered morbidly over the details of erotic life and the orgasm. A book that followed by just three years the better-known one on kissing Sáname con tu boca. El arte de besar, a publication that was exhumed on the occasion of his appointment as Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and for which he had defended himself by saying that it was a booklet that collected a catechesis for adolescents, when he was a young parish priest. Given the encore, Tucho must have been very fond of teenage booklets....

The 1998 book disappeared from the face of the earth and was never heard of again. Fernández, since 1993 vice-dean of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Buenos Aires, was thus able to take off and become first dean, then vice-dean of the Pontifical University of the Argentine capital (2002), and finally rector (2011). However, someone must have felt a certain annoyance at seeing this character, without merit or adequate competence, rise to the position of Prefect of the DDF and demolish, document after document, what remains healthy in the Catholic Church. Particularly indigestible was the latest stunt to humiliate the Church before the world, by allowing the blessing of sodomite couples through the Declaration of 18 December last year, and with the ridiculous justification given by the Press Release of 4 January, that of the 10-15 second blessings.

The book La Pasión Mística, a little over ninety pages, has therefore been exhumed, and the most scandalous chapters (pp. 65-92) have been re-proposed and translated into English, of which we report a few excerpts also in Italian, so that you may understand the tenor of the publication. And we apologise in advance to readers for certain expressions that appear in the text.

Let us immediately make it clear that the problem is certainly not to affirm the positivity of sexual pleasure in the divine project, nor to understand that sexual difference, as well as the specific characteristics of a culture and an individual, certainly come into play in our relationship with God. The point is another, namely the obsessive morbidity with which Fernández lingers in the details of erotic life and, specifically, the orgasm. 

A blatant trait, which raises more than a few doubts about the author's problematic dimension, to say the least. That in just three years Tucho, who has long since committed himself to a celibate life by reason of his priesthood, could not help but write two books of the same tenor, almost as if he could not refrain from dealing with these topics and in a pornographic manner, at the very least makes one wonder. And we hope it also makes those who placed him at the head of one of the most important dicasteries of the Roman Curia think too.

Anyone who has approached St John Paul II's five years of catechesis on the theology of the body, has never been able to notice any delay on the part of the Pontiff in useless - for the purposes of anthropological and theological reflection - erotic details, which should be kept silent because of concupiscence, which, like it or not, has come to upset God's plan precisely in the dimension of sexual relations. Tucho's perspective, however, belongs more to the Tantric tradition than to the Christian one. 

Let us look at the content of some of the chapters we have chosen to translate. Tucho dedicates chapter six to describing 'an experience of love, a passionate encounter with Jesus, which a sixteen-year-old teenager told me'. If one reads the details of this account, one can easily realise that this 'love experience' reveals quite clearly the hormonal upheavals typical of adolescence. Tucho, on the other hand, presents without any problem, as if it were an authentic mystical experience, the desire of this young woman to 'touch' Jesus in his different body parts. "If you are the most beautiful, Jesus, why not contemplate you, why not admire you, why not enjoy you?" and on goes the list of this 'enjoyment'.

A parish priest remotely worthy of the name should have moderated the girl, warned her against mistranslation of an understandable desire for intimacy, to be assumed and ordered, into a supposed mystical experience. Instead, Tucho takes this experience, baptises it as a 'passionate encounter with Jesus' and slaps it down in print, as an exemplum of the sexual dimension in mystical life..

The next chapter is even more pathological. It is a detailed description of the difference between the male and female orgasm, and then sees 'whether these peculiarities of man and woman in orgasm recur in some way also in the mystical relationship with God' and brings up (chapter 8) St Teresa of Avila and St Teresa of the Child Jesus.

Then concluding (chapter 9) on the 'presence of God in the couple's orgasm'. It should be noted that Tucho always speaks of the couple, of 'sexual union as an act of love'. His focus is therefore not on the conjugal act, but on the purely sexual act, which would open up to divine contemplation as an "act of love" involving pleasure, not as the mutual donation of spouses open to life. The future Prefect of the DDF wrote: "If God can be present at that level of our existence, He can also be present when two human beings love each other and reach orgasm; and that orgasm, experienced in the presence of God, can also be a sublime act of adoration of God". The deviation is quite obvious: the orgasm, reached by 'two human beings who love each other', becomes an act of worship. Married, cohabiting, homo or trans, it seems not to be a discriminating factor: the important thing is that they love each other and that they reach orgasm.

The orgasm, then, as the eighth sacrament? More: the orgasm as the path that leads quickly to paradise: 'Thus the pleasure of the orgasm becomes an anticipation of the wonderful feast of love that is paradise'. Because, according to Tucho, 'sexual pleasure does not hinder spirituality or contemplation, because if sexual union is an act of love, it only opens the heart, and so facilitates the contemplation of God'. It does not appear that the characterisation of this act as conjugal is decisive for Fernández; the important thing is love and pleasure. Nor does he seem to have the realistic Christian prudence that knows very well that enjoying the pleasure of an ordained act is not a sin, but knows equally well that this ordination, after original sin, is the fruit of constant, courageous and sometimes painful asceticism. Thematics not forthcoming.                                                                                                                

A final, banal consideration: what does Tucho know about the details of orgasm? Theoretically, ordained in 1986, at the age of 24, and presumably having entered the seminary at least six years earlier, at 18, he should not be very familiar with it. Perhaps too many morbid confidences? Perhaps. And, even though indicative of imprudence, let us hope this is the case.