Posted in category "Arts & Letters"
I’m curling up with a good book by the fireplace this Christmas: The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period. Written by Michael Goodich, the book was published in 1979.
I have often wondered why and when the church began to focus on sodomy as a sin so detestable it crystallized in the phrase “peccatum mutum” – the mute sin, the silent sin- the secret sin. What combination of people and events came together to ignite a centuries-long persecution of homosexuals by the church? Why did it start? What incident, situation, person or persons was the catalyst for the continuing cascade of religious persecution that began in the 11th century?
Three other books dealing with medieval gay history are also on my list to read: John E. Boswell’s two books – Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Christianity From the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (1980); Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (1995); and Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050-1230 (2004) by William Burgwinkle.
One major aim of his work, Dr. Boswell wrote, was “to rebut the common idea that religious belief–Christian or other–has been the cause of intolerance in regard to gay people.”
Dr. Goodich seems to have drawn the opposite conclusion.
In two 1976 articles in the Journal of Homosexuality, Michael Goodich briefly sketched the close connection between heresy and sodomy in 13th century secular and ecclesiastical law. His book, The Unmentionable Vice, elaborated that sketch into a full-scale study of homosexuality in Europe from the 11th to the early 14th century. Goodich posits it is during this period the Catholic Church consolidated its moral condemnation of homosexual activity.
Although the Council of Ancyra had treated sodomy as a crime as early as 314 A.D., at the beginning of the 11th century there was no uniform legislation on the subject. It seems to be been regarded primarily as a non-Christian vice.
But thereafter more and more attention was given to sexual conformity. Two treatises devoted to the denunciation of homosexuality, Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrah (1049) and Alan of Lille’s Complaint of Nature (ca 1165) were published during this period.
With the opening of the Fourth Latern Council (1215), “a more miltant, aggressive phase opened in the history of the Catholic Church,” Goodich writes. The penalities for conviction of sodomy continued to be strengthened, and the Inquisition was developed as a means of hunting down heretics and sodomites. The Domincian Order was to take an instrumental role in exterminating heresy and hunting down that “evil filth” (sodomites).
Although he was an Italian Renaissance figure, in the 1490s Dominican Girolamo Savonarola of Florence succeeded in declaring sodomy a capital offense punishable by death.
One of the interesting parts of Goodich’s book is the verbatim report of the trial for heresy and sodomy of Arnold of Verniolle in 1323. The distance between theoretical views and actual practice (sound familiar!) is shown by the apparent ease with which he met his partners.
By his own confession, Arnold committed sodomy with several young men, whose testimony is also included. Arnold was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment in chains, on a diet of bread and water.
What happened to him?
The Secrets (Ha-Sodot) follows two young students in an all-female seminary in Safed, Israel.
Desire, awareness, a need for fulfillment, and stretching religious tradition makes things as messy for them. This is a situation many Catholic lesbians, or feminist Catholic women, for that matter, can immediately identify with. It almost always leads to a crossroads, where either choice brings loss as well as new, fertile ground.
The heroine of The Secrets is Naomi, the brilliant, beautiful, and headstrong daughter of a revered Orthodox Israeli rabbi. The film begins with Naomi entreating her father to postpone her marriage to his sour, self-righteous protege so she can pursue her religious studies at a seminary for women in Safed, the birthplace of the Kabbalah. Her distant dream is to one day become the first female Orthodox rabbi in a culture in which men smugly dismiss women’s conversations as “idle chat.”
Naomi begins to change when she forms a friendship with Michelle, one of her roommates. A sullen, chain-smoking Parisian student, Michelle’s family sent her to the seminary for disciplinary reasons. The two students fall in love. 
When Michelle visits Naomi during the Jewish holidays the two friends become lovers. Naomi, consulting sacred texts, determines there is no law against lesbian love, that homosexuality is taboo only for men, who spill their seed.
Their passionate explorations in romance and religion eventually get them expelled from the seminary. Michelle also becomes torn between Naomi, and a kind-hearted man, a klezmer clarinetist.
Near the film’s end they drift apart–Michelle toward marriage and Naomi toward declaring her independence in a society dominated by men.
“This is a movie about desire,” one rabbi commented. “Frustrated desire. Fulfilled desire.”
See the movie trailer here.
..says Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini. The cardinal stated 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (”Of Human Life”) has cut off the church from many of the people who most need its advice about human sexuality. It may be time, he said, for a “new vision” for sexuality and birth control. 
The encyclical, which teaches that condoms, birth control pills, IUDs and other “artificial” birth control methods are morally wrong, caused a large number of people to stop taking the church’s views seriously, Martini said. “Serious damage was done.”
Martini, an 81-year-old Jesuit and former archbishop of Milan, made the comments in a book-length interview, Nighttime Conversations in Jerusalem: On the Risk of Faith (Conversazioni notturne a Gerusalemme. Sul rischio della fede was published by Mondadori, Milano, 2008)
He did not address specifically the morality of contraception but suggested that the question might be better approached from a more pastoral perspective.
Today, he said, the church might be able to adopt “a new vision” and indicate “a better way” than it did in Humanae Vitae. “The church would regain credibility and competence,” he said.
“Knowing how to admit one’s errors and the limitations of one’s previous viewpoints is a sign of the greatness of soul and confidence,” he said.
Cardinal Martini said the church should take a positive approach to human sexuality, with less emphasis on prohibitions. “Whatever the church affirms, it should be supported by many people, by conscientious in love,” he said.
On a personal note, I was a teenager in the years following Vatican II, and can still feel the reverberations of that era. The cardinal is right when he states the church lost a lot of its credibility after Humane Vitae. More, I think, then even the global priest-child sex abuse crisis of the 1990s.
It is my belief the church lost its footing in the 1960s with its rigidity over birth control and also its dismissal of the Latin Mass.
It has yet to regain it, primarily because of the attitude of the Vatican towards sex and sexuality and their hostility to other voices who question their reasoning. Celibate clerics continue to run the discussion to the exclusion of everyone else. Why are they surprised when no one pays attention?
I believe it was a mistake to toss the Latin Mass out the door so fast. It’s abrupt departure shook a foundation of Catholic identity. The church could have eased the transition by making the Latin Mass more accessible and participatory, and made some accommodation for national, ethic and local customs and observances.
But, that kind of leadership requires flexiblity, listening skills and a willingness to include the laity in decision-making; qualities never much in evidence in the institutional church in that or any other period.
On the subject of birth control, both teenagers AND their parents–even those stoutly against premarital sex (like my parents!)–thought the church’s stance stupid and delusional.
Cardinal Martini is right–the church lost the respect of a generation of Catholics and the strict adherence of the rest. People continued to identify as Catholic, but stopped paying attention to rules, regulations and sins they didn’t agree with. They stopped because they didn’t have any basis in real life, and they weren’t based on common sense.
On the issue of birth control, no family was going to wind up with 8 or 9 children, out of 14 or 15 pregnancies, just because some pampered, out-of-touch celibate decreed it was God’s way.
By the decade of the ’60s, many Catholic men who served in WWII and Korea had gone to college on the GI bill and wanted their children to have a college education. Parents wanted the “better things” in life for their families. This meant having smaller families.
Parents, adults, also had more time and opportunity for sex, and wanted that sex to be a good lusty romp, not a mystical union.
The availability of birth control was the biggest boost to a good sex life. Couples could have sex a lot more, whenever they wanted. Birth control allowed couples to have sex without worrying about unplanned pregancies. This was especially important to women, who always had the fear of pregancy to contend with every time she had intercourse. Not having to worry about getting pregnant was a major boost to a woman’s enjoyment of sex.
The pope should be made aware good sex and lots of it makes for happy Catholics. Not the opposite.
Yes, a “new vision” is needed for the church on sex and sexuality. After 40 years, it’s time to admit Humanae Vitae was a mistake, and move forward to a Catholic view sexuality that is reality-based and natural; not artificial in its prohibitions and fears.
The late John Paul II was wounded in a 1982 knife attack. The would-be assassin, a priest, attacked the pope during a visit to Fatima Square in Portugal. The priest was opposed to the reforms adopted by the church after Vatican II.
The pope kept the injury secret. He carried on with the trip without disclosing his wound.
The incident is described in a new film, Testimony, and is based on the 2007 book of the same name by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the pope’s long-time secretary and friend. Cardinal Dziwisz accompanied Karol Wojtyla from his time in Poland until his last days in the Vatican. The film is a testimony of John Paul II’s life, presenting many new facts and interpretations. 
The film premiered at the Vatican on October 16, 2008. It is narrated by actor Michael York.
Dziwisz, who is now cardinal of Krakow, Poland, was John Paul’s private secretary and closest aide for nearly 40 years, including all his 27 years as pontiff.
“Today I can say what up to now we have kept secret,” Dziwisz said in the move. “That priest wounded the Holy Father..When we got back to the room there was blood.”
The attack occured on May 12, 1982, when Juan Fernandez Krohn lunged at John Paul with a bayonet during a ceremony in the shrine of Fatima in Portugal. The Pope had gone to the shrine to give thanks for surviving a gunshot wound from Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981.
Krohn was an ultra conservative priest, and former member of the Society of Saint Pius X. He was expelled from that group because he openly proclaimed Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre opposition to Pope John Paul II was too weak. 
Krohn was expelled from Portugal in 1985 after serving half of a six year jail sentence.
Gay clerics and those rumored to be–nuns, priests, bishops, cardinals, monks, abbots, even popes–have been with us always. Some were celibate. Others were not. Most were discreet. Others celebrated their love and loves. One of them was Alcuin of York.
Alcuin, also known as Alcuinus (Latin) and Ealhwine (Saxon) was born in York, in Northumbria, England in 735 A.D. 
At the invitation of Charlemagne, Alcuin headed the king’s school for his children at Aachen from 782 to 796. He was a leading figure at court during that time. He wrote many theological and dogmatic treatises, as well as a few grammatical works and a number of poems.
Alcuin was made abbot of Saint Martin’s at Tours in 796, where he remained until his death on May 19, 804. He is considered among the most important architects of the Carolingian Renaissance.
John Boswell, in Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980) writes:
“A distinctly erotic element…is notable in the circle of friends presided over by Alcuin at the court of Charlemagne. This group included some of the most brilliant scholars of the day (Theodule of Orleans, Anglibert, Einhard, et al,), but the most erotic element subsisted principally between Alcuin and his pupils. Intimates of this circle of masculine friendship were known to each other by pet names, most of them derived from classical allusions, many from Vergil’s Ecologues..The prominence of love in Alcuin’s writings, all of which are addressed to other males, is striking…”
One of the most famous poems is addressed to a student whom Alcuin called “Daphnis” and laments the departure of another student, “Dodo,” who is referred to in the poem as their “cuckoo“. 
Boswell explains that “One expects hyperbole in poetry, but even in Alcuin’s prose correspondence there is an element which can scarcely be called anything but passionate. He wrote to a friend (a bishop…)
‘I think of your love and friendship with such sweet memories, reverend bishop, that I long for that lovely time when I may be able to clutch the neck of your sweetness with the fingers of my desires. Alas, if only it were granted to me, as it was to Habakkuk (Daniel 14:32-38), to be transported to you, how I would sink into your embraces,..how much would I cover, with tightly pressed lips, not only your eyes, ears and mouth, but also every finger and toe, not once but many a time.”
“Love has penetrated my heart with its flame,” wrote Alcuin to Arno, Bishop of Salzburg (c. 750-821). “Neither sea nor land, hills nor forest, nor even the Alps can stand in its way or hinder it from always licking at your inmost parts, good father, or from bathing your heart, my beloved, with tears…Let us seek the delights and ever-enduring realms of heaven with our whole heart, mind, and hand. The blessed hall of heaven never separates friends; a heart warmed by love always has what it loves. Therefore, father, abduct me with your prayers, I beg you (precibus rape me). Then our love will never be estranged.”
Surely, Alcuin was one of the first Catholic religious figures to blend gay sexuality and spirituality in his writing, relationships and life.
St. Peter Damian was a monk. He lived in Italy in the 11th century. A reformer, he focused on homosexuality in the clergy. 
Ironically, his time and writing are a distant mirror to our own day – perceptions of rampant homosexuality in the hierarchy and clergy; sex abuse or at least use, of young men and boys. The prescription for reform was the same: harsh punishment, including banning gay men from religious orders and seminaries.
Were monasteries and clerics ripe for reform? Yes. But it also appears that reformers like Peter Damian didn’t possess the healthiest psychological state. His ferocity and leaning toward an eremtic life didn’t have a broad appeal. In fact, I believe they stemmed from his own internal fear and loathing.
Among his most famous writings is his lengthy treatise, Letter 31, the Book of Gomorrah (Liber Gomorrhianus). It was presented to Pope Leo IX in 1049 or 1051. Leaving nothing to misinterpretation, Damian distinguishes between the various forms of sodomy beginning with solitary and mutual masturbation and ending with interfemoral (between the thighs) stimulation and anal sex.
Pope Leo IX accepted his letter, agreed with everything he had to say, and outside of a few examples, did very little.
What kind of a man was Peter Damian? 
- He couldn’t bear the “distractions” of university life so he left
- He wore a hairshirt “to arm himself against the alurements of pleasure and the wiles of the devil”
- His excessive “watchings” brought on a severe insomnia which was cured with difficulty
- Both as a novice and professed religious his fevour led him to such extremes of penance his health was affected. This included fasting and mortification, including self-flagellation.
Previously used as a punishment, St. Damian played a crucial role in popularizing this practice. This is discussed at length in the book, In Praise of the Whip by Niklas Largier, a professor of German at the University of California-Berkeley 
Is this the type of person we want creating a moral blueprint for sex?
When he’s not serving as a chaplain to a monastery of contemplative nuns in the heart of Hollywood, Dominican Fr. Dominic DeLay is making films. 
His latest, Inside Darkness, is a 35-minute political suspense thriller that has its origins in the last presidential election, when DeLay said he was left with the question of how good and smart people could think so differently from himself about politics.
Inside Darkness is about three presidential candidates–the female evangelical incumbent, a black Catholic and former Marine colonel, and white agnostic religious studies professor–who awaken in a dark cell. 
“I thought I’d just put three very different people in this room together and see how they treat one another. Forget why they believe what they do. Can they at least respect each other and have a conversation?”
But can they?
“It’s very difficult for them,” said DeLay. “Fear and suspicion really kick in. After awhile, their suspicion turns from the people they think are outside the room to each other.”
A conversation with his sister gave him some insights why people react to candidates and politics they way they do.
“I understood she just had a couple of really strong beliefs and she was looking at the candidates through that prism. I think we must have certain fundamental beliefs that we look at the world with, and so we hear everything in relationship to that.”
DeLay went on: “If people aren’t talking about the poor, one kind of person is going to say, ‘Well, what’s going on here?’ And for others, if people aren’t talking about what they call traditional family values, then they can’t hear that candidate.”
The film, which is available on DVD, was released by Mud Puddle Films, a non-profit ministry of the Dominican friars of the Western United States.
Starting October 13, the film will be released in free seven-minute webisodes with the last installment the day before the election on November 4th.
DeLay is starting a new film on the seven deadly sins. When asked which one he thought was the worst sin, he said he would go with the “traditional assessment of pride as the ‘deadliest’ sin and perhaps even the root of the others.”
The sin of pride with politics makes for a natural sequel.
In her new book, Being Catholic Now, Kerry Kennedy interviewed famous Catholics from far left to far right; including Susan Saradon, Martin Sheen, Bill O’Reilly, speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, Gabriel Byrne, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Maher. “I was struck by their raw honesty,” Kennedy said. 
She cried when Byrne told her his story about being abused by a priest as a boy, and spotting the abuser at a football game decades later. “I called him and asked if he remembered me,” said the actor. “He said,”No’– He didn’t make the connection, but I, of course, did.” Byrne blames the vows of celibacy, “which I regard as a sin against human life.”
Susan Saradon strikes a lighter note with a story of praying with rosary beads at age seven and not knowing they were glow in the dark. “I looked down and they were glowing and I thought, “Oh, my God, I’m about to have a vision! The Blessed Virgin is about to come in the door!”
Church officials have not yet seen the book, but a spokeswoman for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, said in response to a description of the book, “A lot of Catholics are having lovers’ quarrels with the church.”
The Deacon’s Bench has a good post on this story.
Kerry Kennedy will discuss the book during a program at the Museum of the City of New York on Wednesday, October 22nd at 6:30 pm. 
Silent screen actor Ramon Novarro (1899-1968) was one of early Hollywood’s leading actors. He got his big break in the 1923 movie Scaramouche, and went on to play the title role in 1925’s Ben Hur and later appear with Greta Gardo in Mata Hari. 
Novarro was gay. Even under pressure from MGM studio head, Louis B. Mayer, Novarro refused to contract a “lavendar marriage”–something most homosexual stars did to keep their contracts and stay out of gossip columns.
He was also a devout Roman Catholic all his life, and at one time considered becoming a priest.
Ramon Novarro was murdered by two brothers, Tom and Paul Ferguson, whom he paid to come to his Laurel Canyon home for sex. Tom was 17 and Paul was 22. Novarro had slept with Paul a number of times before. On this night he brought along his brother to help him rob Novarro. The two young men believed that a large sum of money was hidden in Novarro’s house.
Paul had sex with Novarro, and then the brothers beat and tortured him looking for the money. After they left the house, he suffocated in his own blood.
To avoid Novarro’s slipping into unconsciousness, the brothers dragged him into the bathroom, slapping him awake with cold water. Novarro staggered into the bedroom. Collapsing on his knees, he sobbed: “Hail Mary full of grace.”
Tom’s defense attorney, Richard Walton, placed the blame for the murder on Novarro. “Back in the days of Valentino, this man who set female hearts aflutter, was nothing but a queer. There’s no way of calculating how many felonies this man committed over the years, for all his piety.”
Paul Ferguson blamed his Catholic background: “When he kissed me, I reacted like a Catholic, what they call homosexual panic. Some old guy in the desert says, ‘Kill homosexuals.’ It’s inbred…I was too drunk to be civilized. Whatever my most primitive moral standings were, I reacted. It had nothing to do with Novarro, nothing to do with his being homosexual. It all had to do with how I saw myself. And the fact that my brother was there. And that he could see me in that homosexual act. It all had to do with my Catholic upbringing, with my five thousand years of Moses. And that’s the only reason why this whole thing happened. Because that’s what society teaches you…I think after I hit Mr. Novarro…I turned around and sat down on the sofa. I got up and went to find (Novarro) in the bedroom. ‘This guy’s dead’…We didn’t go there to rob him.”
Novarro was interred in Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles. His killers were released from prison after a few years.
Author John Rechy describes the murder in his blog, Speaking Out. The events he describes are drawn from the book, Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro. 
A 3′ tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus has ramifications for Christianity–mostly positive–but with plenty of room left for debate. 
It speaks of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. Jesus’ predictions of a suffering messiah, one who would bring salvation to the people of Israel, were not new. They were circulating years before his ministry, and can be found in the Book of Isaiah.
Ada Yardeni, who analyzed the stone together with Binyamin Elitzur, is an expert on Hebrew script, especially of the era of King Herod, who died in 4 B.C. The two of them published a long analysis of the stone tablet, dubbed “Gabriel’s Revelation,” more than a year ago in Cathedra, a Hebrew-language quarterly devoted to the history and the archaeology of Israel. Yardeni and Elitzur said that based on the shape of the script and the language, the text dated from the late first century B.C.
Israel Knohl, a professor of Bible Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalypic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In Knohl’s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the stone was a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian army, according to first-century historian Josephus. The slaying of Simon, or any suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation.
Knohl focuses on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in three days.” The next word of the line was deemed illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative.
It was less important, Mr. Knohl said, whether a man named Simon was the messiah of the stone than the fact it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus.
“His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come,” Mr. Knohl said. “This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of the people but to bring redemption to Israel.”
