Aquinas saw redeeming feature in rape; women mystics wrote of eroticized violence
Julie Miller knows when her students at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio are going to get riled up. It's at the point when, discussing rape, one of them asks if the Catholic church always considered rape a sin.
And theology professor Miller, 37, replies, "Yes, it was a sin, but interestingly, if we look at Aquinas' natural law theory, rape wasn't that bad a sin. It was ...