Dubia Cardinal Invokes St. Peter Damian, Condemns ‘Sodomitic Filth’ in Church

LifeSite News ^ | 11/6/18 | Sandro Magister

[marshmallow]

November 6, 2018 (L'Espresso) – "The situation is comparable to that of the Church in the 11th and 12th century." As an authoritative Church historian and as president of the pontifical committee of historical sciences from 1998 to 2009, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, 89, has no doubt when he sees the present-day Church "shaken to its foundations" on account of the spread of sexual abuse and homosexuality "in an almost epidemic manner among the clergy and even in the hierarchy."

"How could it have come to this point?" the cardinal wonders. And his answer is found in an extensive and detailed article published in recent days in the German monthly "Vatican Magazin" directed by Guido Horst:

Homosexualität und Missbrauch – Der Krise begegnen: Lehren aus der Geschichte

In its complete Italian version:

Omosessualità e abusi – Affrontare la crisi: le lezioni della storia

Brandmüller refers to the centuries in which the bishoprics and the papacy itself had become such a source of wealth that there was "fighting and haggling over them," with temporal rulers claiming that they themselves could apportion these offices in the Church.

The effect was that the place of pastors was taken by morally dissolute persons who were attached to the endowment rather than to the care of souls, by no means inclined to lead a chaste and virtuous life.

Not only concubinage, but homosexuality too was increasingly widespread among the clergy, to such an extent that Saint Peter Damian in 1049 delivered to the newly elected pope Leo IX, known as a zealous reformer, his "Liber Antigomorrhianus," composed in the form of a letter, which in essence was an appeal to save the Church from the "sodomitic filth that insinuates itself like a cancer in the ecclesiastical order, or rather like a bloodthirsty beast rampaging through the.......