Wikipedia says of a “whiskey priest” that he is “a stock character who shows clear signs of moral weakness while preaching. . .a higher standard.” Perhaps you are familiar with the original whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory. Many Catholics are troubled by the book. If it is meant to portray the truth, that the objective work of the sacraments can be accomplished by a priest, in virtue of the “character” impressed upon his soul, even if he has deep flaws – then there is no problem.
But suppose Greene is saying something else, like “this is what sanctity looks like today”? Then surely that is problematic. And how far can that strange idea be taken? Suppose a priest habitually commits serious sins, like larceny or battery, can he be a saint? What if they are sexual sins? Supposing if he is living with his boyfriend?
Let’s change the image. In 1996 a movie was released called Breaking the Waves, about a woman, Bess, whose husband becomes paralyzed from the neck down in an industrial accident. He asks his devoted wife, since she cannot have relations with him, to have sex with another man and tell him the details. She fights off her revulsion and does so, putatively to show her love. Subsequently, she spirals down into a degraded condition where she seeks out grotesque abuse. There’s a kind of twisted altruism to her path of self-destruction. Could she perhaps beneath it all be a saint?
Yes, the priest and theologian Víctor Manuel Fernández opined in a 1999 article, “The Mysticism of Tending to Another.” The key, he says, is to grasp what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors.” [1735] Therefore, “a life of grace can coexist with actions which are objectively evil yet for which a person is not fully responsible.” Morality and mysticism can diverge, Fernández observes. In people like Bess, “there can be a genuine gift of oneself to another, in which the Procession of the Spirit is prolonged, together with a beautiful (bella) sapiential experience, in which the Procession of the Son is prolonged – but coexisting with ethical defects. . . .I can accept the positive interpretation which some commentators have placed on the film.”
In another article the same year (again citing CCC 1735) he says, “Fools can also be in God’s grace, even if they commit objectively grave actions, but are not guilty. . .holiness can coexist with psychic disturbances, to the point that a madman can be holier, living a more intense degree of charity, than a completely sane and healthy person.” Once we reject Pelagianism, we see that “There is no preparation that can merit friendship with God, which transcends us.” For all we know, such friendship may be granted to those who objectively are committing grave sins.
These articles were written at the same time as Fernández’s orgasm book, La Pasión Mística. I do not accept that that book is something he can now disclaim – not that he has done so. He was 36 years old, not a callow youth, already a widely published scholar. The book, then, must be imputed to his mature character and his considered judgment.
Besides, it requires sustained attention over many months for an author to see a book through to publication – outlining, drafting, editing, copy editing, proofreading. Lots of opportunities for second-guessing: no book can be dismissed as a “mistake” or the result of “inadvertence.” Besides, the same strange use of the CCC 1735, the same idée fixe, is found in that book also (p. 80), to underwrite the idea that persons in same-sex sexual encounters are not hindered from attaining the same heights of mystical ecstasy.
Not that the idée fixe is limited to just those years. In articles written five years later, and then ten years, he uses the idea in the same way. In the latter, “Trinitarian Life, Ethical Norms, and Human Fragility,” in relation to same-sex couples, Fernández says, “If an action of some strongly conditioned subject may be objectively evil but not imputable – and therefore not guilty – then it does not deprive that person of the life of sanctifying grace.”
Similarly, “sexual action outside marriage may be not guilty – and therefore does not deprive someone of the life of grace – which implies that, in the midst of his situation (not the act) of objective sin, there may be in his heart a good and meritorious dynamism produced by grace itself.” Well then, why not bless the “situation”?
Do we accept this line of reasoning: a man commits a serious crime; but suppose the imputability of his action is diminished; therefore he remains in a state of grace; therefore he can even have exemplary holiness? Does this line of thought fall squarely within the core of magisterial teaching about human responsibility, grace, and holiness?
But if it applies anywhere, if it applies to Bess and a madman, then it should apply everywhere. What about this case: “This man was sexually abused as a boy; but sexual abuse tends to be transmitted; so he remains conditioned by it; therefore, when he abuses boys himself as a priest, he remains holy.”
And who would be so harsh as to refuse to bless such a priest with his boy? Since this case must be dealt with like all the others.
Recoiling from the conclusion, someone might say that, in Fernández’s strange speculations, one sees a bizarre separation of common sense from a supposed mystical reality. A divergence of Christian life from “objective morality” (a.k.a. the law of God). A lack of consonance between how parents must direct their children, and how priests should counsel them. And a strange conception of responsibility, not recognized in courts of law, nor found in the manuals, St. Thomas, or Aristotle. An astonishing new development.
