Catholic Nun Tells Vatican to Decriminalize Masturbation "Self-Pleasure"

Sister Talks Sex

It’s hard to say which is weirder. A Sister of Mercy writing about the Kama Sutra, sexual desire and “our yearnings for pleasure.”
Or the Vatican getting so hot and bothered about the academic treatise on sexuality that the pope censures it, causing it to shoot from obscurity to the top tier of Amazon’s best-seller list six years after it was published.
Just the latest chapter in the Vatican’s thuggish crusade to push nuns and all Catholic women back into moldy subservience.
Even for a church that moves glacially, this was classic. Just Love: a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics is written by Sister Margaret Farley, published in 2006. She’s a 77-year-old professor emeritus at Yale’s Divinity School, a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and an award-winning scholar.
The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which seems as hostile to women as the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, spent years pondering it, then censured it March 30 but didn’t publicly release the statement until Monday.
The denunciation of Farley’s book is based on the fact that she deals with the modern world as it is. She refuses to fall in line with a Vatican rigidly clinging to an inbred, illusory world.
One where men rule with no backtalk from women, gays are deviants, the divorced can’t remarry, men and women can’t use contraception, masturbation is a grave disorder and celibacy is enshrined, even as a global pedophilia scandal rages.
In old-fashioned prose steeped in historical and global perspective, Farley’s main argument is that justice needs to govern relationships. In the interest of justice to oneself, she contends that “self-pleasuring” needs “to be moved out of the realm of taboo morality.”
Immanuel Kant, who considered masturbation below the level of animals, must give way to Alfred Kinsey. Sister Margaret Farley writes:
“It is surely the case that many women, following the ‘our bodies our selves’ movement in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, have found great good in self-pleasuring.
“Perhaps especially in the discovery of their own possibilities for pleasure. Something many had not experienced or even known about in their ordinary sexual relations with husbands or lovers.
“In this way, it could be said that masturbation actually serves relationships rather than hindering them.”
A breath of fresh air in the stultifying church, she makes the case for same-sex relationships and remarriage after divorce.