SOME CITATIONS FROM SACRED TRADITION ON HOMOSEXUALITY
Tertullian (2nd century): All other frenzies of lusts which exceed the laws of nature and are impious toward both bodies and the sexes we banish…from all shelter of the Church, for they are not sins so much as monstrosities.” (De pudicitia, IV).
The Council of Elvira (305-306) excluded from communion, even in articulo mortis, the
corrupters of boys…
The Council of Ancyra (314) established penances of at least 15 years for sodomy
St. John Chrysostom (4th century): “… There is nothing, absolutely nothing more mad
or damaging than this perversity.” (Homilia in Epistula Pauli ad Romanos)
The Third Lateran Oecumenical Council (1179) decreed: “Anyone caught in the
practice of the sin against nature, on account of which the wrath of God was unleashed upon the children of disobedience (Eph. 5:6), if he is a cleric, let him be demoted from his state and kept in reclusion in a monastery to do penance; if he is a layman, let him be excommunicated and kept rigorously distant from the communion of the faithful.
Saint Albert the Great (12th to 13th c) gives four reasons for condeming homosexuality: they are born from an ardent frenzy; they are disgustingly foul; those who become addicted to them are seldom freed from that vice; they are as contagious as disease, passing quickly from one person to another. (In Evangelium Lucae XVII, 29).
St. Thomas Aquinas (13th c): Just as the ordering of right reason proceeds from man, so the order of nature is from God Himself: wherefore in sins contrary to nature, whereby the very order of nature is violated, an injury is done to God, the Author of nature. Hence Augustine says (Conf. iii, 8): Those foul offenses that are against nature should be everywhere and at all times detested and punished, such as were those of the people of Sodom, which should all nations commit, they should all stand guilty of the same crime, by the law of God, which hath not so made men that they should so abuse one another…(ST II, II, Q. 154, a. 12, Reply Obj. 1)
Saint Catherine of Siena (14th c) recorded a mystical locution from Our Lord in which
He said: “For Me, this sin against nature is so abominable that, for it alone, five cities were submersed, by virtue of the judgment of My Divine Justice, which could no longer bear them…”
Pope Saint Pius V on April 1, 1566, during his attempt to counter Renaissance
homosexuality, ordered those guilty to be abandoned to the secular arm.
The 1917 Code of Canon Law punished guilty priests, saying: “Let them be declared infamous and suspended from every post, benefit, dignity, deprived of their eventual stipend and, in the gravest cases, let them be deposed” (Canon 2359, par.2).