Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/285

 The topic of uranian clergy especially in the history of the Catholic and Orthodox priests, bishops cardinals and popes, in every degree of moral and intellectual endowment, would make easily a volume by itself. From the hermits of the Thebaid, whose orisons and mortifications of the flesh could not purge them of sexual desire, up to the occupants of the Chair of Peter, the Romish hierarchy have been uranianistic. The debaucheries of homosexual pontiffs, such as Alexander VI, Sixtus IV, John XXII, Julius III, and others exhibited especially pederastic passion in the higher priesthood. The Monastic Orders, century by century of their existence, have been sorely troubled (or else practically have not been troubled at all) by invincible homosexuality in the cloister. The austerities of the Carthusians and Trappists, the intellectualism of the Jesuits and Benedictines, the fervid piety Of Dominicans, Franciscans and any others, have never eradicated it; and in some chapters of Church-history we find that they thought best to tolerate it. To-day it flourishes in the Catholic seminary and the parish-rectory, We must not argue that its existence implies the unspirituality of the Church, and a dismissal of moral conduct. Where it is not inborn, it has much to do with the celibate life of the Catholic ecclesiastic, the attitude of personal reserve toward woman that he must cultivate. One can even trace an antiquated spiritual-sexual casuistry in it. It is contagious in the novitiate. Many a dionistic priest becomes perceptibly homosexual before he has received his tonsure. The theory of a strictly celibate clergy is untenable in natural and social morality. It rests on no divine authority. It is a human abnormalism, except when invited by a distinct frigidity of temperament, a weakly frame, or advanced years. Unfortunately, a young priest usually has vigour of bodily constitution, and often has quite as strong, or even stronger, impulses to sexual intercourse than the average. A sedentary life increases his emotion.