Survivors of clerical sexual abuse expressed alarm at Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández’s The Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality (AP, CWN coverage).
“It was absolutely nauseating,” one female survivor said of the recently rediscovered 1998 book. “It brought a lot back from my own abuse, because some of the things I read were similar to what my rapist would say — sort of combining abuse with things of a spiritual nature.”
Teresa Pitt Green of Spirit Fire, a Christian restorative justice network, was particularly troubled by Fernández’s account of a conversation with a 16-year-old girl.
“The boundary violations are staggering,” said Pitt Green: “psychologically, potentially physically, certainly from an intellectual point of view, normalizing certain things for people that probably don’t even know it.”
Shortly after his July appointment as prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, another book by the prelate—Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing (1995)—attracted controversy. In that work, which he described as a catechetical text for adolescents, Fernández published four of his own erotic poems (analysis).