Vatican’s Chief Guardian of Doctrine Wrote Pornographic, Blasphemous Book
Last night, the Lepanto Institute obtained a photocopied version of a book published in 1998, written by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, the prefect for the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith. Cdl. Fernandez is currently at the center of a major controversy regarding the permission to “bless” same-sex couples, and his book, “La Pasion Mistica,” describes in graphic detail the events of male and female orgasms and compares those experiences with intimacy with God. He also suggests that “God’s grace can coexist” with homosexual acts under certain circumstances, blurs the line between males and females, and even provides transsexual and pederast imagery in relation to Divine Intimacy.
Online references to “La Pasion Mistica” are nearly impossible to find, and the Vatican’s list of published works by Cdl. Fernandez has conspicuously omitted this book. However, there are a few online resources which make reference to the book as far back as 2006. For instance, an article appearing in the July 2006 issue of Revista Neustra America titled [in English] “Symbolic Images of Evil in the Mystical Discourse of New Spain,” cites Fr. Victor Manuel Fernandez’s book in relation to its explicit imagery regarding human orgasm. On Feb. 6, 2012, a blog titled, “Books by Victor Manuel Fernandez” supplied a complete list of books written by him, including “La Pasion Mistica.” A search for the book’s ISBN yielded shockingly few results, and while there is some acknowledgement of the book’s existence by book sellers, the book could not be found for sale ANYWHERE. And given the content of the book, it wouldn’t be a stretch for one to believe that Fernandez had hoped to make it disappear as he was on his way to higher prominence.
“La Pasion Mistica” is broken into nine chapters, each one making gradual, perverse steps toward sexualizing Divine intimacy with God. The chapters are:
Presentation………………………………………… 3
- The fire of divine love ………………………………… 7
- A well of sublime passion ………………………….. 17
- A crazy love story……………………………………….. 25
- The mystical passion …………………………………. 35
- Until the end …………………………..…………………. 45
- My beautiful one, come ……………………………… 59
- Male and female orgasm………………………………65
- The path to the orgasm……………………………….. 75
- God in the couple’s orgasm…………………………..85
While there are deeply concerning statements contained throughout the book, the real problems begin in Chapter 5 where Fernandez begins to sexualize the mystical experiences of saints. The chapter, titled, “Until the End,” presents the story of Blessed Angela Foligno, a 13th century nun who enjoyed mystical conversations and ecstasies with Our Blessed Lord. Cherry-picking various lines from Bl. Angela’s writings, Fernandez reduces the sublime mystical experience to human orgasm. On page 48, for instance, Fernandez wrote:
“But let’s see how Angela continues saying that her experience is not only spiritual, but also physical, corporeal. Her mystical joy had all the characteristics of an orgasm:
There is nothing that penetrates the soul so much with burning fire, as when Christ is in the soul with delight of love… Then all the members feel a detachment, and I want it to be so. And all the members feel a sublime intoxication, in which I would like to always remain. And the members also shout when they disengage.”
Fernandez also sexualized an experience of St. Clare, suggesting that a vision that illustrates St. Francis of Assisi’s role the one to nourish her soul was somehow akin to a sexual engagement. On page 53, he wrote:
We also find something of this in the curious “vision” of Saint Clare, where she describes an encounter of hers with Saint Francis, after his death, with erotic characteristics:
Clara told that once, in her vision, it had seemed to her that she was carrying a pot of hot water to Saint Francis. And when she arrived next to Saint Francis, the saint took a nipple from his breast and said to the virgin Clare:
“Come, take and suck.” And after she sucked, the saint encouraged her to suck again; and as she sipped, what she took from there was so sweet and so pleasant that she could not express it in any way. And when he was satisfied, the roundness or mouth of the breast from which the milk came out remained between Clare’s lips (Acts of the canonization process of Clare, 3, 29).
While this passage taken from the Acts of the Canonization Process of Clare may seem odd, the mystical symbolism is clear – St. Francis of Assisi would nourish Clare as a mother nourishes a child. But Fernandez refers to this encounter as “erotic.”
In Chapter 6, “My Beautiful One, Come,” Fernandez extends the bridge of sexualizing the mystical language of the saints to something he claims a 16-year-old girl told him about an erotic encounter she had with Christ. Writing in his own words, he quotes the girl as sensually caressing the skin of Christ, leading to an intimate moment in which Our Blessed Mother “leaves her alone” with Christ. Beginning on page 60, Fernandez wrote:
“And your mother, the freest woman in history, also allows me to love you; She agrees to share this sublime joy with me and leaves us alone. I caress your hands, Lord, I intertwine your fingers with mine, I feel the heat and delicacy of your skin. I caress the tips of your fingers, while I contemplate that most holy wound that you keep in the palm of your hand. I kiss that wound, Lord, and so I love you. Here where no one else knows, where all the secrets of my soul are revealed to you, without fear, shamelessness. So that your love heals everything, illuminates everything, orders everything.
I caress your arms, Jesus, gently. These arms that were hanging on the cross, that knew the most terrible pain, and now rest triumphant, full of life and harmony, full of warmth and health. Let me caress them, Lord, even if this love does not return the affection that I denied you so many times; but let at least in this moment be only you the love of my life.
The most beautiful face you could imagine, the most attractive features anyone could think of. Let me caress your cheeks, your forehead, your eyelids now half open.
You are awake, Lord, you do not ignore my presence and my caresses. Although you don’t need them, you agree to receive them from me, because you became a man so you could love me better.
I caress your face, Jesus, and I reach your mouth. Your mouth that pronounced the most important words in history, your mouth that spoke with love and for love.
I caress your lips, and in an unprecedented impulse of tenderness you allow me to kiss them softly. I thought I heard your invitation that appears in the Bible: “Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth.” But only now do I dare to obey you, and in this delicate kiss it is not you who receives something; It is my little humanity that receives everything, everything from you.”
While everything leading up to this chapter is merely suggestive, chapter 7 of Fernandez’ book, “Male and Female Orgasm” removes all doubt of the fully carnal nature in which he took all of these experiences. Beginning on page 65, Fernandez casually mentions that women are not as sexually aroused by “violent” pornographic depictions, “images of orgies,” and “hardcore pornography” before diving right into graphic descriptions of the act of sexual intercourse and descriptions or orgasmic experiences. What he wrote in this regard is SO graphic, we refuse to reproduce it here, but given the intimate descriptions of what he wrote, we have to ask, “How does he know this?” Some things are known by experience, alone.
Beginning on page 69, Fernandez cited Carlo Carretto, a priest who in 1974 actively campaigned in Italy in favor of legalized divorce. Blurring the lines between male and female and speaking in direct relation to human sexuality and orgasmic experiences, Fernandez points out Carretto’s intimate experience with God wherein he “felt like a little girl.”
“In fact, Carlo Carretto, a man with markedly masculine characteristics, tells us that in his most wonderful encounter with God, he felt like a confident little girl, which he did not find bothering or contrary to his deepest inclinations, but rather sweet and marvelous:
At twenty-three years old, when God burst into me with his Spirit, my relationship with him completely changed my life… God intervened as a lover. At first, it seemed like something so beautiful and so warm that I looked at it as a sentimental presumption… I feared I was falling prey to cheap romanticism… But it wasn’t like that. The intimacy that he gave me was so true, so strong, that it left traces, and he left them where doubt was not possible… I will never forget the irruption of his Spirit in me. It was really the emergence of a crazy lover, who asked me to respond to him with all my madness… Then I understood by experience that each one of us, even if he is a male, God calls as if he were a female. When I am at home with him, I snuggle next to him like a little girl who expects everything from him and without pretending to know everything… The entire spirituality of the biblical man is femininity: receptivity, availability, waiting, desire for smallness, service, adoration… For some reason women are most willing to what is religious (He buscado y he encontrado, Bs. As., 1985, 59-61.70). 6
But let us say, more precisely, 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. And in that center, we are all receptive and live an experience in which we are not fully masters of ourselves. For this reason, scientists usually say that the differences between men and women are experienced in the stage prior to orgasm, but not so much in the orgasm itself, where the differences between the feminine and the masculine are no longer so clear and seem to disappear.”
In Chapter 8, “The Road to Orgasm,” Fernandez takes what is already a perverted interpretation of Divine Intimacy with God and directs it in an even more pernicious direction. On page 76, Fernandez explains that the “sensual” intimacy of the saints suggests a passionate sensuality that is owed in justice by virtue of this passion requiring fruition, saying:
“If this passionate experience of God frees our psychology from so many feelings of dissatisfaction, from so many wounds that we have received due to lack of love, then we have the right to desire that God grant us that liberating experience.”
After meandering about the topic of prayer, intimacy, forgiveness, and proper disposition to receiving from God an experience of Divine Intimacy, Fernandez inexplicably tosses in a suggestion that “God’s Grace can coexist” in homosexual activity when there is a very strong force of habit that may lessen guilt of these objectively grave evils. On page 80, he wrote:
“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. Let’s see how the Catechism of the Catholic Church says this:
Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors (CCC 1735).
There may be a religious sister who has to make great sacrifices to be faithful to her virginity, because her psychology has some strong conditioning in that order, and yet, at the same time, she has a beautiful, very authentic experience of the love of God, which makes her happy. Let us finally say that, in order to achieve a joyful and passionate experience of divine love, there is an extremely important cooperation: the acts of love for our brothers.”
Finally, in Chapter 9, “God in the Couple’s Orgasm,” Fernandez speaks NOT of human marital relations, but finding God “when two human beings love each other and reach orgasm.” Beginning on page 85, Fernandez wrote:
“So far, we have talked about the possibility of reaching 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, so that a satisfaction that encompasses the entire person is experienced. This leads us to another important consequence: it invites us to discover that, 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 worship to God.
This is indubitable if we start from a basic assumption: God loves man’s happiness, therefore, it is also an act of worship to God to experience a moment of happiness.”
Bear in mind that Fernandez wrote this not long after explaining that there are situations in which homosexual acts, while objectively sinful, can be done in some situations wherein the act does not incur guilt. It is difficult to see how what he wrote here would not also apply to what he wrote about the potential for guilt-free homosexual acts. But even worse, Fernandez goes to great lengths in this chapter to exalt orgasmic experiences as they very height of sexual intimacy without even once mentioning the purpose of sex – the begetting of children. In fact, Fernandez strongly suggests that helping to bring the other to completion is the true meaning of self-giving love in sexual intimacy. He wrote:
“Obviously, we do not want to say that everything that has to do with the body is holy, because a couple can take away from sex its most precious purpose, and lovers can become just two egomaniacs who masturbate each other. Furthermore, sex should only be a part of the couple’s life, a pleasant way to express love and make each other happy; sex for sex’s sake is a way of remaining in adolescence and a lack of maturity.
…
For sex not to be just a way of using and consuming each other, it is essential that the couple have other concerns and, above all, that mutual love opens up to seek together the happiness of others. Fighting together for something, getting out of the suffocating confinement of both, prevents pleasure from getting sick or dying, because this way the heart keeps itself open. In fact, in the Christian image of God, the love between God the Father and his Son is necessarily opened to a third person, the Holy Spirit. Therefore, all authentic love of a couple, source of the best pleasures, is open to others. The pleasure that not only produces a momentary release, but also plans and gives happiness, is the one that is united with love, and love is true holiness.
…
To separate God from pleasure is to give up living a liberating experience of divine love. Wanting to hide from God when we experience pleasure, like that woman who used to hide the crucifix when she had intercourse with her husband, is believing in a false God who, instead of helping us to live, becomes a persecutor who hates our joy.”
Analysis
This book by Victor Manual Fernandez reveals a perverted mind with a twisted theology. His scandalous descriptions of intimate bedroom behavior may be expected in the pages of a pornographic magazine, but they have no place in Catholic theology. Furthermore, his reduction of the mystical experiences of the saints to sexually orgasmic experiences is not only debased, but it borders on (if not transgressing into) blasphemy and sacrilege. But by far, the worst elements of the book have to do with the reduction of the marital act to the experience of pleasure between two “human beings” for the sake of bringing the other to completion as expressions of “true love.” Not only does he conspicuously omit the primary purpose of the marital act (the begetting of children), but his reduction of the act to expressions and experiences of pleasure opens the door for contraception and sodomy.
Fernandez reveals of himself a perverted and shallow understanding of theological Truth and an extremely dangerous understanding of human sexuality that is so far removed from the universal and unchanging teachings of the Church that he should be immediately removed from his position in the Vatican.
The author must have been satanic.
Interesting, isn’t it, that the young Polish priest-student Karol Wojtyla managed to research and write extensively about human sexuality (in the context of marriage) and the procreation of children, comparing this fruitful love to God’s love for souls as described in the writings of St. John of the Cross, and he never came anywhere near speaking in an off-color way! Fernandez’s writings strike me as a kind of parody of Wojtyla, even anti-Wojtyla.
Very well said! It was God who created sex, not Satan who is the Ultimate Parasite and creates nothing, and it is godly self-transcendent sex within a one man-one woman couple where it achieves its highest purpose of always-centering-in-God pleasure, a pleasure that itself never ever becomes central but leads to self-sacrifice always being central, as is the generation and raising of children.
Neither sexual pleasure (nor celibacy) are ever automatic acts of worship to God, as Fernandez says, and a little generosity does not make them any better, as he alleges here. Both can occur in very sinful people who are direct enemies of God. He is using the delusions and perversions of the very popular Americanized Tantra Yoga, New Age, etc. inside that horrible book and will bring those again as “God inspired pure ancestral cultural legacies” to cover up his perverted Gnostic Homosexual Immorality of comparing God-ordained spiritual ecstasy to self-centered sexual physical orgasm. All Catholic Media should be alert and ready to combat this huge humanity-destroying fraud.
Can we talk about the cover art for a moment?
arthistoryproject dot com lists this painting as The Abduction of Psyche but notes a better translation from the original French might be The Rapture of Psyche. William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the artist, was a man stolen from a life in the clergy by a life spent lingering on and spreading risqué depictions of the female form – typically nude. He has made some fascinating and chaste religious depictions which any online Catholic will find familiar (The Madonna of the Lilies, The Virgin With Angels).
The story of Psyche is derived from a 2nd century smut story by Apuleius, The Golden A**. Cupid is also known as Eros, a more traditional depiction of an ancient demon. Psyche is a mortal in the story who becomes immortal after tribulations. Apparently, Apuleius concocted both the mythical story of Cupid and Pysche and the beastial erotic tale it is found in from whole cloth.
Original Christian attempts at adapting the “classical” work began in the 5th century, finding allegory by inverting the moral and telling how sexual love draws Psyche into the material world that is subject to death. A work which monks probably should have burned rather than preserved, as it soon fell into the hands of gnostics.
Smoochy has now firmly added himself to those unable to prevent themselves from eschewing the call of demons, possibly no less than Eros himself. May we pray for his conversion.
My wife is a retired ballet dancer, a soloist with a world class ballet company in New York. I have been around the homosexual community most of my adult life. It is not an exaggeration to say that erotic sex is their highest expression of meaning, hence their self-identification as homosexuals. These reflections read like a prolonged self-justification for this man’s own sinful behaviors.
Although Wojtyla, in his Love and Responsibility, then further in his collection of General Audience speeches entitled Theology of the Body, doesn’t reach down and use such vulgar and pornographic imageries and descriptions but keeps his language “philosophical”, yet he does make the mistake, and thereby opens the door, by equating the unitive with the procreative, a false doctrinal development.
Thank you for exposing the truth about this evil cleric. I pray he will publicly repent of his many errors, then return to God’s graces. But I will never read the filth he wrote.
In Hoc Signo Vinces!
Michael, was it necessary to include this smut on your website?
I love your faithfulness in exposing the perverse things being done by the modernists apostates in the Novus Ordo sect.
How can the Pope, in good conscious, let this person remain in the posistion of “Chief Guardian”
Bishop Strickland was removed for what? Being too zealoius? how does that even compare?