Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments as follows:
Speaking tonight in St. Louis at this weekend’s conference of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) is Sister Margaret Farley, the nun whose book, Just Love, has been criticized by the Vatican. The CTSA defends Farley, as does Lisa Miller of the Washington Post: Miller says Farley is acting in the grand tradition of the late Catholic feminist Mary Daly. Also speaking at the conference is retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland. Who are these people?
Farley’s intellectual hero is Michel Foucault, a homosexual drug addict who intentionally transmitted HIV to unsuspecting boys and who also justified rape. In the 1970s, the CTSA sponsored a book by Rev. Anthony Kosnick, Human Sexuality, that took a radically nonjudgmental position on homosexuality, swinging, adultery, and bestiality; it was used to teach seminarians at a time when the sexual abuse scandal was in full swing (the book was censured by the Vatican). Mary Daly taught at Boston College for decades, maintaining that Christianity was a form of “phallicism” and oppression; she quit in 1999 when she was told that she could no longer ban men from her classes. Weakland resigned as Archbishop of Milwaukee after it was discovered that his male lover of 23 years was paid $450,000 from church funds to keep quiet.
The fact of the matter is that some on the Catholic left are prepared to embrace virtually every expression of sexual deviance, no matter how perverse. Worse, after contributing to the root causes of the priestly sexual abuse scandal, they have the audacity to blame the Vatican, as well as the American bishops. Moral depravity on a large scale does not spring from a social vacuum—it is driven by a milieu that invites it.
