Love and Just-ness
Much has been written about the Vatican’s recent censure of Margaret Farley’s 2006 book, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. The high degree of denunciation of this censure has been thoughtful and heartening. Among the many things I find fascinating about the Vatican’s response (with it’s suspect timing) as Baptist observer has been the arrogant sense of power assumed by the Vatican as it presumes to respond to a book expressly written to not address Catholic teachings and to not represent official Catholic doctrines. Anyone who has read her previous work, Personal Commitments: Beginning, Keeping, Changing, is not surprised when Farley responded that what she does in Just Love is to address “contemporary interpretations” of justice and fairness in human sexual relations, moving away from a “taboo morality” and drawing on “present-day scientific, philosophical, theological, and biblical resources.” Further, “I can only clarify that the book was not intended to be an expression of current official Catholic teaching, nor was it aimed specifically against this teaching. It is of a different genre altogether.”
And perhaps this is the crux of the matter—Farley is urging us into a different conversation about sexual ethics that is framed by a concern for justice and fairness first. These become the yardsticks of judging our attempts at morality when it comes to sexual ethics rather than what is often our more common temptation to bring a great deal of moral litter and prohibitions that do not reflect the result of thoughtful and caring Christians seeking to live faithfully. This is not the work of a raging hedonist who is unformed by faith and tradition, but one that is formed by careful pastoral concern for how we treat one another as sexual beings and peoples gifted by God’s grace and mercy. Judgment does come, but it is not in the face of an avenging Vatican. It comes in the ways that after we have engaged a work such as Farley’s that we attempt to live our lives out of a richer and deeper sense of the mysteries of faith as it manifests itself in the ways we touch one another—in respect, in love, in joy, with justice.