ROME — Pope Francis has elevated Argentinian Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, his longtime friend and ghostwriter, as new chief of the Vatican’s powerful doctrinal office.
Archbishop Fernández, who was Francis’ first episcopal appointment after becoming pope, is know as a theological progressive who penned several important texts for the pontiff, including his 2015 encyclical letter on the environment Laudato Sí and his controversial 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love).
Fernández has been a staunch supporter of Pope Francis and in 2018 sharply attacked a Vatican whistleblower who criticized Francis for enabling serial homosexual abuser Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
Among the books written by the 60-year-old Fernandez, a past rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, was a surprising text titled Heal Me With Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing, which he published in 1995 as a 33-year-old priest.
“I want to clarify that this book was not written so much based on my own experience, but based on the lives of people who kiss,” Fernández wrote in the introduction. “In these pages I want to synthesize the popular feeling, what people feel when they think of a kiss, what mortals experience when they kiss.”
“So, trying to synthesize the immense richness of life, these pages emerged in favor of kissing,” he wrote. “I hope that they help you kiss better, that they motivate you to release the best of your being in a kiss.”
In his research on kissing, Fernández said he consulted about 1000 people “on the street.”
“I went to bars, colleges, businesses, in order to ask young people about what they knew to say about kissing,” he wrote. “I collected varied opinions about what a kiss means for them, about the different ways of kissing.”
“The penetrating kiss is when you suck and slurp with the lips. The penetrating kiss is when you stick in your tongue. Watch out for teeth,” he wrote, citing one of his interlocutors.
In a sincere kiss “there is always something divine; as if the kiss made us transcend human limits in an experience of ecstasy, as if we left ourselves to enter into another dimension,” he wrote.
In an open July 1 letter to Fernández laying out his tasks as the Vatican’s doctrinal czar, Pope Francis urged the new prefect to avoid the “immoral methods” used by his predecessors when “rather than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were pursued.”
“What I expect from you is certainly something very different,” Francis wrote.
Your task implies “a special care to verify that the documents of your own Dicastery and of the others have an adequate theological support, are coherent with the rich humus of the perennial teaching of the Church and at the same time take into account the recent Magisterium,” he wrote.