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By San Pier Damiani (Introduction by Roberto de Mattei)
His Liber Gomorrhianus appeared around 1049, in an era in which corruption was widespread, up to the top of the ecclesiastical world. In this writing, addressed to Pope Leo IX, Pier Damiani denounces the perverse vices of his time with a language that knows no false mercy and compromises.
He is convinced that of all the sins, the most serious is sodomy, a term that includes all acts against nature, which aim to satisfy sexual pleasure by diverting it from procreation. “If this absolutely ignominious and abominable vice is not immediately stopped with an iron fist, – he writes – the sword of divine wrath will fall upon us, bringing many to ruin”.
Pope Leo gratefully welcomed the Liber Gomorrhianus, writing to Pier Damiani that "each of the statements in this writing meets with our approval, like water thrown on the diabolical fire" and, taking up the saint's indications, he intervened firmly against the sodomites in the Church. Today, writes Roberto de Mattei in his introduction to the work, “Liber Gomorrhianus reminds us that there is something more serious than practiced and theorized moral vice. It is the silence of those who should speak, the abstention of those who should intervene, the bond of complicity that is established between the wicked and those who, under the pretext of avoiding scandal, remain silent and by remaining silent consent and, worse still, the acceptance by men of the Church of homosexuality, considered not as a very serious sin, but as a positive 'tension' towards the good, worthy of pastoral welcome and legal protection [...]. Will the reading of Liber Gomorrhianus instill the spirit of Saint Pier Damiani in the heart of some prelate or lay person, shaking him from his torpor and pushing him to speak and act?”
San Pier Damiani (1007-1072), abbot of the monastery of Fonte Avellana and later cardinal bishop of Ostia, was one of the most prominent personalities of the Catholic reform of the eleventh century.
Roberto de Mattei is professor of Modern History and Christianity at the European University of Rome and president of the Lepanto Foundation.
Gianandrea de Antonellis, writer, taught Christian literature at the Higher Institute of Religious Sciences in Benevento.
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Luisella Scrosati, La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana , 14-1-24
Great reformer and hermit, Pier Damiani denounced plagues such as simony and homosexuality among the clergy. But his Liber Gomorrhianus was uncomfortable even for the popes who agreed with him, probably because they felt the pressure of the sodomite clerics.
A great saint reformer, unfairly little known. Born in Ravenna in 1007, his father died very early and abandoned by his mother (she also died shortly after) due to the extreme poverty of the family, he was first raised by a brother, who treated him very harshly; then he was raised by another brother, the archpriest Damiano, and started to study the arts of the trivium and quadrivium. Having become a professor, he was deeply affected by an episode in which he read a divine warning: having refused a poor man alms, according to some, or white bread, according to others, he risked suffocating to death due to a bone stuck in his throat. He thus decided to embrace the solitary life, entering the hermitage of Fonte Avellana, a not very large Camaldolese monastery, which was however a hotbed of saints (76, according to Camaldolese tradition) and future bishops, very important for the reform of the Church.
A great saint reformer, unfairly little known. Born in Ravenna in 1007, his father died very early and abandoned by his mother (she also died shortly after) due to the extreme poverty of the family, he was first raised by a brother, who treated him very harshly; then he was raised by another brother, the archpriest Damiano, and started to study the arts of the trivium and quadrivium. Having become a professor, he was deeply affected by an episode in which he read a divine warning: having refused a poor man alms, according to some, or white bread, according to others, he risked suffocating to death due to a bone stuck in his throat. He thus decided to embrace the solitary life, entering the hermitage of Fonte Avellana, a not very large Camaldolese monastery, which was however a hotbed of saints (76, according to Camaldolese tradition) and future bishops, very important for the reform of the Church.
Pier Damiani was elected prior in 1043 and became the protagonist of numerous new foundations, zealously propagating the hermitic life as the culmination of cenobitic monastic life. But it is enough to take a look at his letters, collected in eight volumes in the Opera omnia, to understand how this hermit was particularly attentive to the plagues from which the Church of his time suffered, especially simony and homosexuality in the clergy, trying to denouncing evil, advising pastors, including popes, to implement a courageous reform. For this reason, Pope Stephen IX (1020-1058) appointed him bishop of Ostia and cardinal in 1057; a position which he seems to have accepted only under penalty of excommunication and which he endured for only ten years, then managing to return to the hermit's life.
But let's take a step back. With the pontificate of Leo IX (1002-1054), Saint Pier Damiani began his significant influence on the reform of the Church. There are two writings denouncing the sins of the clergy, widespread and very serious, with the proposal of a more decisive and rigorous line by the Pope: the Liber Gratissimus of 1052, on simony, and the Liber Gomorrhianus, composed in 1049, on homosexuality in ecclesiastics. Both writings were welcomed by Leo IX, but something in the relationship between the two soon ended up cracking. Later, in 1059, he also wrote a small book, De cælibatu sacerdotum, precisely to urge Pope Nicholas II (ca 980-1061) to act against prelates who had concubines and who violated the chastity typical of their state.
As for the first publication, Pier Damiani proposed a firm line against simony, but at the same time explained that the ordinations conferred to or by simoniacious prelates were still valid. On the opposite front, Cardinal Umberto da Silva Candida (†1061), in his Adversus simoniacos, instead supported the need to reorganize those who had received ordination from simoniacious bishops. Leo IX appeared strongly undecided in this regard, and it was only with Nicholas II, during the Roman Synod of 1060, that the definitive position of non-reordination was taken.
But Leo IX's management of the problem of homosexuality appears even more curious. The Liber Gomorrhianus represented the strongest and clearest attempt to strike at the heart of this plague present in the clergy, which Pier Damiani called "quadruple vice", in reference to the four concrete ways in which homosexual practice took place, starting from sinning with oneself , which he considered as a first degree of sin against nature, up to the properly sodomite act. The position of Pier Damiani, who also did not intend to arrogate himself the authority to impose ecclesiastical sanctions, was very firm and decisive not only due to the gravity of the unnatural sin, but also and above all due to the fact that it was committed by clerics. In fact, he declared "contrary to reason and to the sanctions of the Fathers" that "those who habitually stain themselves with this purulent disease dare to enter the order and remain in their rank".
Saint Pier Damiani therefore maintained that those who were habitually implicated in any of these quadruple faults, even if not the most serious, had to be dismissed from the clerical state. Leo IX, in the letter Ad splendidum nitentis (1054), responded personally to the hermit, sharing the firm condemnation of the «unbridled license of muddy lust» and recognizing that those who have been guilty of these sins have always been «removed from all degrees of immaculate church", in accordance with the sacred canons. But, not without disapproving Pier Damiani, the Pope decided to operate "with greater benevolence", allowing those who had been purified by a "worthy penance" and having put "a curb on lust" to be reinstated in their rank of sacred order. they were indeed guilty, "but with not a long practice nor with many people" and provided they had not "sinned in the back".
A decision that was certainly condemnatory, but which left wide margins for interpretation, risking weakening the fight against active homosexuality in the clergy: what did a "not long practice" mean? And what was meant by “many people”? A letter (cf. PL 144, 208B-209C) written between 1050 and 1054 seems to attest to the fact that there was a certain distance between the two; Pier Damiani reproaches the Pope for having believed some lies against him, without wanting to verify the facts. It is not known who and for what reason spread falsehoods to the detriment of the hermit; and we don't even know the content of these lies. The fact is that the pontificate of Leo IX slipped away, without too much harm to those ecclesiastics who practiced homosexuality.
But Liber Gomorrhianus was to encounter an even more singular misfortune. When, in 1061, Anselmo da Baggio was elected Pope, choosing the name of Alexander II (+1073), the hour seemed to have come for perversions in the clergy. Anselmo da Baggio had been, together with Pier Damiani, the protagonist of the reform of the Church of Milan; between them there was communion of intent and friendship. Furthermore, Pope Alexander owed his friend a strenuous defense of the legitimacy of his election against the antipope Honorius II. Even his positions as pontiff indicated a desire to fight strenuously against simony and Nicolaism. Yet, in a letter (cf. PL 144, 270A-272C) addressed to two cardinals (including Hildebrand of Soana, future Gregory VII), Pier Damiani complained that the Pope had borrowed the copy, probably the only one, of a book dear to him (which many identify with the Liber Gomorrhianus), and he had never returned it to him. In essence, a kidnapping. It is not difficult to think that the book in question must have been very inconvenient and annoyed more than one of the ecclesiastics who worked in the Roman Curia.
San Pier Damiani therefore did not have an easy life precisely in terms of denouncing homosexuality in the clergy. The popes were certainly against this plague, but they seemed to approach the reform with a handbrake. A certain vagueness on the part of Leo IX first, and a probable desire not to offend Pier Damiani's adversaries on the part of Alexander II then, make it clear that the problem was evidently not only widespread, but also penetrated even to the men closest to the popes. Who evidently felt the pressure. The case of Leo IX is then particularly significant: behind his "more human" way of acting, one cannot perhaps see the very practical problem that, in dismissing from the clerical state all those who were guilty of the "fourfold vice", would there have been many problems finding sufficient replacements?
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What did Saint Pier Damiani think about homosexual practice? He said: it's the worst of vices!
Written by the Saint and Doctor of the Church San Pier Damiani , perhaps for the pro-gay Vatican lobby that wants to change the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the subject of sodomy: 1867 " The catechetical tradition also reminds us that there are "sins that cry out to heaven". They cry out towards heaven: the blood of Abel; the sin of the Sodomites ( Cf Gn 18,20; 19,13) ; the lament of the oppressed people in Egypt; the lament of the foreigner, the widow and the orphan; the injustice towards the wage earner ".
Louis
Throughout the Middle Ages, i.e. in the period of formation of Western Christian civilization, the Church never stopped promoting the virtue of temperance and renewing the condemnation of unnatural vice; in this way she managed to reduce it to a very rare and marginal phenomenon.
Among the saints who fought homosexual vice in the Middle Ages, one of the greatest was Saint Pier Damiani, Doctor of the Church, reformer of the Benedictine order and great writer and preacher. In his Liber Gomorrhanus, written around 1051 for Pope Saint Leo IX, he denounces with great vigor the spiritual ruin to which those who practice this vice are condemned. A vice is spreading in our parts that is so gravely nefarious and ignominious that if zealous punitive intervention is not opposed as soon as possible, the sword of divine wrath will certainly rage enormously, destroying many. (…) This turpitude is rightly considered the worst of crimes, since it is written that the almighty God hated it always and in the same way, so much so that while for the other vices he established limits through the legal precept, this vice he wanted to condemn him, with the punishment of the most rigorous revenge. In fact, it cannot be hidden that He destroyed the two infamous cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and all the neighboring areas, sending rain of fire and brimstone from the sky (...)
And it is quite right that those who, against the law of nature and against the order of human reason, hand over their flesh to the demons to enjoy such disgusting relationships, share the cell of their prayer with the demons. In fact, since human nature profoundly resists these evils, abhorring the lack of the opposite sex, it is clearer than the light of the sun that it would never taste such perverse and alien things if the sodomites, who have become almost vessels of wrath destined for ruin , were not totally possessed by the spirit of iniquity; and in fact this spirit, from the moment it takes possession of them, fills their souls so gravely with all its infernal wickedness, that they crave with their mouths wide open not what is solicited by their natural carnal appetite, but only what it proposes. them in his diabolical solicitude. Therefore, when the mean man rushes into this sin of impurity with another male, he does not do it because of the natural stimulus of the flesh, but only because of the natural impulse. (…)
This vice should not be considered an ordinary vice at all, because it surpasses all other vices in severity. In fact, it kills the body, ruins the soul, contaminates the flesh, extinguishes the light of the intellect, drives out the Holy Spirit from the temple of the soul, introduces the demon instigator of lust, leads into error, uproots the truth with a deceived mind, prepares snares for the traveler, throws him into an abyss, closes him there so as not to let him out again, opens Hell for him, closes the door of Paradise to him, transforms him from a citizen of the celestial Jerusalem into the heir of the infernal Babylon , from a star in the sky to straw destined for eternal fire, separates him from the communion of the Church and throws him into the voracious and seething hellish fire. This vice strives to undermine the walls of the heavenly Fatherland and to repair that of the burned and revived Sodom. In fact, it violates austerity, extinguishes modesty, enslaves chastity, kills irrecoverable virginity with the dagger of an impure contagion, defiles everything, stains everything, contaminates everything, and as far as it can does not allow anything pure, chaste to survive. , of a stranger to filth. (…).
This pestilential tyranny of Sodom makes men shameful and drives them to hatred towards God; he plots wicked wars against God; it crushes its slaves under the weight of the spirit of iniquity, severs their bond with the angels, takes away the unhappy soul from its nobility by subjecting it to the yoke of its own dominion. It deprives its slaves of the weapons of virtue and exposes them to being pierced by the arrows of all vices. It makes them humiliate in the Church, it makes them condemned by justice, it contaminates them in secret, it makes them hypocrites in public, it gnaws at their conscience like a worm, it burns their flesh like fire. (…) This plague shakes the foundation of faith, weakens the strength of hope, dissipates the bond of charity, eliminates justice, undermines fortitude, takes away temperance, dampens the acumen of prudence; and once he has expelled every wedge of virtue from the curia of the human heart, he intrudes every barbarity of vice. (…) As soon as one falls into this abyss of extreme ruin, he is exiled from the celestial Fatherland, separated from the Body of Christ, refuted by the authority of the universal Church, condemned by the judgment of the holy Fathers, despised by men and rejected by communion of saints. (...) Let these wretches therefore learn to repress such a detestable plague of vice, or manfully tame the insidious lasciviousness of lust, to restrain the annoying incentives of the flesh, to viscerally fear the terrible judgment of divine rigor, always keeping in mind that threatening sentence of the Apostle (Paul) who exclaims: “It is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10). (…) As Moses says “If there is anyone who is on God's side, let him join me!” (Ex. 32). That is, if someone recognizes himself as a soldier of God, he should fervently set about overcoming this vice and should not neglect to destroy it with all his strength; and wherever it is discovered, let him attack it to pierce it and eliminate it with the sharpest arrows of the word”. (San Pier Damiani OSB, Liber Gomorrhanus, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 145, coll. 159-190).
(The texts above were translated by Google Translate)
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