1986: Homosexual Infiltration Of The Catholic Clergy.

Father John F. O'Connor O.P

Saint Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus [Book of Gomorrha], addressed to Pope Leo IX in the year 1051, is considered the principal work against homosexuality. It reads: “Just as Saint Basil establishes that those who incur sins [against nature] … should be subjected not only to a hard penance but a public one, and Pope Siricius prohibits penitents from entering clerical orders, one can clearly deduce that he who corrupts himself with a man through the ignominious squalor of a filthy union does not deserve to exercise ecclesiastical functions, since those who were formerly given to vices … become unfit to administer the Sacraments.” (St. Peter Damian, op. cit., cols. 174f)

Regarding this vice of Sodomy among clerics Saint Peter Damian Said:
"For God's sake, why do you damnable sodomites pursue the heights of ecclesiastical dignity with such fiery ambition?" . . . . "lest by your prayers you more sharply provoke Him Whom your wicked life so obviously offends."

St. Peter Damian:
“[The vice of sodomy] is this vice that violates temperance, slays modesty, strangles chastity, and slaughters virginity.”
“Without fail, [the vice of sodomy] brings death to the body and destruction to the soul. It pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the mind, expels the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart, and gives entrance to the devil, the stimulator of lust.”