Author of the week: Sister Margaret Farley

last updated 8 January 2015

Sister Margaret Farley probably never expected to make the best-seller list, said Cindy Ok and Jeffrey Bloomer in Slate.com. But two years after the Vatican commenced a review of her 2006 book, Just Love, the church formally censured it last week and sent it soaring from No. 142,982 on Amazon.com to No. 16. In Just Love, the now-retired Yale Divinity School instructor declared that divorce is a valid option for some couples, that masturbation can be a “great good” for women, and that “same-sex relationships and activities can be justified according to the same sexual ethic as heterosexual relationships.”

Farley appears unfazed that the Vatican has scolded her for a “defective understanding” of Catholic teaching, said Michelle Boorstein in The Washington Post. In a written statement released after the Vatican’s announcement, she said that the book “was not intended to be an expression of official Catholic teaching,” but instead uses “traditional and present-day scientific, philosophical, theological, and biblical resources” to “examine the possibility of development in sexual ethics.” A former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Farley argues that her proposals are based on a consideration of “natural law”—a central idea in Catholic theology since Aquinas. The book, Farley says, “suggests the importance of moving from what frequently functions as a taboo morality to a morality and sexual ethics based on the discernment of what counts as wise, truthful, and recognizably just loves.”