Estimating The Number of Homosexual Priests
In 1102, Saint Anselm of Canterbury demanded that the punishment for homosexuality should be moderate because 'this sin has been so public that hardly anyone has blushed for it, and many, therefore have plunged into it without realising its gravity. It was probably only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that a mass condemnation of homosexuality began in Europe. This moderated considerably in the final decade of the twentieth century with the distinction now made by Catholic Church authorities between homosexual orientation and homosexual genital activity, forbidding the latter while tolerating the existence of the former.
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“I am sure that in estimating every man’s value either in private or public life, a pure integrity is the quality we take first into calculation, and that learning and talents are only the second.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
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“We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better.”
—native American belief, quoted by D. Jenness in “The Carrier Indians of the Bulkley River,” Bulletin no. 133, Bureau of American Ethnology (1943)