Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/287

 of Christian morality, whether of old or of to-day".

In the same confidential symposium of ideas of present-day Catholic priesthood in Germany concerning uranianism some twenty-five replies to the circular-letter mentioned were received, such replies being, of course, anonymous as to publication. Some of the writers alluded to the theory, not new, that Saint Paul was not free from homosexual instincts, if indications in the Epistles be accepted.

The reader is referred to the interesting correspondence mentioned, as it appears in the "Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen" (Max Spohr, Leipzig) edited by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld; Volume II, pp. 161-203. Also as an instance of minute study of the Biblical attitude toward similisexuality, may be remarked a contribution made by a Catholic clergyman (anonymous) in the fourth volume of the same "Jahrbuch". In that study, the commentator reviews practically every pertinent passage of the Scriptures; and, as a scholarly priest, he reaches the conclusion that there is no authority for holding decent homosexual love as a sin in the eyes of God, or of society. Instead he finds every reason to think uranians the victims of a warping of social common sense, by mere dogmatic influences.

Removals of the Catholic clergy for similisexual scandals are incessant. The Continental newspapers especially show this, each year. Several grave affairs of the sort are current in the press, as these pages are written; one of them involving a priest distinguished for high attainments and for social and ecclesiastical respect. The murder in 1857 of the saintly and almost adored Archbishop Sibour of Paris, which tragedy occurred while the Archbishop was at the altar, came through the uranistic frenzy of the murderer, himself a priest. It was an episode that cast all Paris, not to say all France, into mourning.