Via CNN

Just a few spots down from the Fifty Shades trilogy on Amazon's bestseller list sits another sex book. You won't find steamy S&M scenes in it, but you will find an American nun telling you that it's a-okay to masturbate, have gay sex, get divorced, and marry more than once. That's not the amazing part. The amazing part is how a book written in 2006 and stuck at #142,982 on the list as of Monday, is suddenly sitting one spot higher than Oprah's new book club selection.

The book, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, was formally and publicly denounced by the Vatican on Monday and banned from Catholic schools. That was enough to shove Sister Margaret Farley's six-year-old book up to the #1 spot on Amazon's best selling religious studies rankings and #16 overall. In fact, you can't even order it on Amazon at the moment because it's sold out. Hey, Vatican: censuring books...you're doing it wrong.

Plenty of theology academics stepped up to support Farley, who is a prominent theologian and professor emeritus at Yale's School of Divinity, which is good because now we get to sit back and watch a bunch of religious leaders battle it out over whether God wants us to touch our naughty bits or not.

Some key arguments:

Sister Awesomeface Farley: “Masturbation… usually does not raise any moral questions at all. … It is surely the case that many women… have found great good in self-pleasuring."

Church: "...masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action..." Sister Farley: “My own view… is that same-sex relationships and activities can be justified according to the same sexual ethic as heterosexual relationships and activities."

Church: "This opinion is not acceptable. ...homosexual acts [are] acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered." Sister Farley: “My own position is that a marriage commitment is subject to release on the same ultimate grounds that any extremely serious, nearly unconditional, permanent commitment may cease to bind."

Church: This opinion is in contradiction to Catholic teaching on the indissolubility of marriage

For the record, I'm pretty sure that any Vatican-approved sex book is simply not worth reading, and this is amusing. But there's a bigger question here. Fifty Shades blew up when libraries started banning it, and this book flew up the charts when the Vatican condemned it, so is getting-banned the new getting-glowing-reviews? If so, I'm off to write something horrifically offensive then swim in a vat of money like Scrooge McDuck.

Image via CatholicLeague.org