Cardinal Victor Fernández, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith has distanced himself from a book in which he explores the concept of the “mystical” orgasm.
Published in Mexico in 1998, Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality discusses spiritual and physical intimacy, male and female arousal and pornography.
One segment portrays a fantasy recounted to Fernández by a 16-year-old girl, involving kissing the body of Jesus on the shore of Galilee, under the approving eye of the Virgin Mary.
Another part of the book says that “an orgasm, experienced in the presence of God, can also be a sublime act of worship of God”.
Fernández also discusses the possibility of “reaching a kind of fulfilling orgasm in our relationship with God”. He wrote that this did not “imply so much physical alterations that simply that God manages to touch the soul-corporeal centre of pleasure”.
Questioned over the book, recently re-discovered by an Argentinean blogger, Fernández said that he “certainly would not write [it] now”.
He cancelled the book after its publication, explaining he had never “never allowed it to be reprinted”. The cardinal explained that he wrote the book for young couples “who wanted to better understand the spiritual meaning of their relationships” but later realised it “could be misinterpreted”.
“That’s why I don’t think it’s a good thing to spread it now,” Fernández told the Crux news agency. “In fact, I have not authorised it and it is contrary to my will.”
He added: “Long after that book I wrote much more serious ones like The Healing Force of Mysticism and The Transforming Force of Mysticism.”
When reports of his 1995 book, Heal Me with Your Mouth: the Art of Kissing re-emerged in the public domain last year, the Cardinal said it was “a pastor’s catechesis for teens” rather than “a book of theology”.
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