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Saint Peter Damian, “Gomorrah”, and

Today’s Moral Crisis – Catholic World
Report
12-15 minutos

Pope Benedict XVI, in his September 9, 2009 general audience, noted that the
Benedictine monk, cardinal, and Doctor of the Church, St. Peter Damian (1007-72), was
“one of the most significant figures of the 11th century … a monk, a lover of solitude
and at the same time a fearless man of the Church, committed personally to the task of
reform, initiated by the Popes of the time.” St. Peter Damian was born into a poor
family (and was orphaned a young age), demonstrated remarkable intellectual skills as a
teenager, and by the age of twenty five was a renowned teacher. He then renounced the
secular life and became a monk, and eventually became prior of the hermitage at Fonte
Avellana.

Between 1049 and 1054, he composed the powerful book Liber Gomorrhianus, or
“Book of Gomorrah”, addressing it to the new pope, Leo IX, who himself would
eventually be canonized. Pope St. Leo IX praised St. Peter Damian’s work and the
monk became a key reformer, addressing widespread excesses and grave sins.

Ite ad Thomam Books and Media has now published a rigorous and careful translation
of The Book of Gomorrah, praised by scholars as “highly readable”, “clear and well-
articulated”, and “excellent and accurate”. Carl E. Olson, editor of Catholic World
Report, recently corresponded with the translator, Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, who is a
graduate student at Holy Apostles College and Seminary and a regular contributor to a
number of Catholic periodicals, including CWR.

CWR: What is The Book of Gomorrah and why did St. Peter Damian write it?

Matthew Cullinan Hoffman: The Book of Gomorrah is a letter written to Pope St. Leo
IX around the year 1049 in response to an epidemic of sodomy among the priests of
Italy, which Peter Damian feared would bring down the wrath of God upon the Church.
This plague of sexual perversion was part of a larger crisis of moral laxity in the
priesthood, including widespread sexual incontinency and illicit marriages, the
simoniacal purchasing of clerical ordination, and the prevalence of a worldly and carnal
mentality among the clergy. The laity were outraged by such behavior and were even
beginning to rebel against the Church hierarchy in some places, such as Florence and
Milan.

The Book of Gomorrah is an eloquent and impassioned denunciation of the vice of

sodomy, describing in harrowing detail the devastating spiritual and psychological
effects on those who practice it. Damian holds that sodomy is the worst of all sins
because it does the greatest harm to the soul, and argues very persuasively that no priest
who is habituated to such behavior should be permitted to continue in the priesthood.
However, the work is not only a condemnation of evil, but also an outpouring of grief
for those who have fallen into such immorality, urging them to “rise from the dead” and
return to Christ, and promising them forgiveness and even spiritual glory if they repent
and do penance. So the work expresses very profoundly both the justice and the mercy
of God.

CWR: How does Peter Damian define “sodomy” and what significance does this have?

Hoffman: This is one of the most interesting and relevant aspects of the book for the
modern reader. Damian sees “sodomitic vice” as not only including homosexual acts
(which he holds to be the most grievous kind of sodomy) but any form of sexual
perversion, which notably includes contraception and masturbation, which he regards as
closely related. In chapter four he notes that God “struck Onan, the son of Jude, with an
untimely death because of this nefarious offense,” that is, spilling his seed upon the
ground rather than completing the sexual act in the natural way.

I believe that by placing contraception and masturbation under the heading of “sodomy”
Damian is recognizing a truth that seems to be all but completely forgotten among
Catholics today, and that is that the sexual revolution and the rise of the social
acceptance of unnatural sexual behavior is rooted in a contraceptive mentality that
divorces the sexual act from its natural procreative purpose, and tends to make it into an
act of selfish, narcissistic lust. Given the almost universal acceptance of contraception in
our society, is it surprising that we have become so numb and unconcerned about the
rise of more perverse forms of the same fundamental vice, and even applaud them?

CWR: Does The Book of Gomorrah address the sexual abuse of minors as well?
Hoffman: Indeed it connects this epidemic of sodomy with the abuse of “penitential
sons” by confessors. It also approvingly quotes an ecclesiastical law that requires any
cleric caught in an act of sexual abuse of a boy or adolescent to be publicly humiliated,
bound in iron chains, required to fast on barley bread for months while imprisoned in a
monastic cell, and then placed permanently in the custody of two other monks to
prevent any further harm to children. Damian’s canon provides a stark contrast with the
lax attitude that so many modern prelates have shown regarding the sexual abuse of
minors, which has caused so much damage to souls and to the Church’s reputation in
recent decades.

CWR: How did Pope St. Leo IX respond to The Book of Gomorrah?

Hoffman: Pope St. Leo IX responded with unreserved praise for the book, writing to
Damian that “everything that this little book contains has been pleasing to our
judgment, being as opposed to diabolical fire as is water.” He even spoke of Damian’s
future entry into heaven, predicting that he would “obtain the palm of victory from God
the Father,” and “rejoice in the celestial mansion with the Son of God and of the
Virgin.” He also ordered the permanent removal of priests who had committed the
worst form of sodomy or who were habituated to the lesser forms of it. In addition, he
decreed the penalty of excommunication for those who committed sodomy at a synod in
France in the same year.

However, in the last century English-speaking scholars have begun to circulate the
strange claim that the pope somehow “rejected” or even “rebuked” Damian. This notion
is not embraced by Damian’s principal modern biographer, the French historian Jean
Leclercq, but it has been repeated often by English-speaking homosexual scholars who
wish to undermine the reputation of the Book of Gomorrah, particularly John Boswell.
As I show in my book, this “rejection thesis” is totally false and is based on a
misreading of a short Latin phrase in Leo’s letter to Damian, as well as unjustified
conjecture about another letter Damian wrote to Leo at a different time. I also show that
not only did Leo not reject Damian’s recommendations for punishing sodomy, but he
went beyond them and imposed a more severe system of punishment than Damian
suggested.

CWR: Why were things in such a bad way at the turn of the millennium? Was this one
of the low points, historically and morally, for the papacy?

Hoffman: Western society had fallen into a terrible moral state due to the general
breakdown of law and order following the disintegration of Charlemagne’s empire in
887 AD, which was accompanied by terrible, predatory invasions by Vikings, Magyars,
and Muslims, who ravaged the continent. Italy, France, Spain, and the British Isles were
particularly affected. The Catholic Church suffered the consequences of this chaos. The
papacy itself came under the influence of secular politics and the personal behavior of
the popes was sometimes the cause of serious moral scandal. Historians have generally
seen this period as the lowest point in the history of the papacy.

Damain committed his life to struggling against this corruption, as I show in the book’s
introduction on his life. He rebuked emperors, bishops, and even popes in his quest to
bring about reform, while always maintaining his unswerving loyalty to the papacy. He
was ultimately raised by Pope Alexander II to the second rank in the Roman Church,
under only the pope himself, and was sent on numerous reform missions on the pope’s
behalf. My book’s introduction includes an extensive account of Damian’s courageous
struggle against corruption in the Church, which includes his confrontation with the
German emperor Henry IV over his attempt to obtain an easy annulment for his
marriage.

CWR: Why a new translation? What are some of the challenges of translating this
work?

Hoffman: The reality is that although two translations already exist in English, both
suffer from inaccuracies, and one is virtually inaccessible to readers. Neither of them, in
my opinion, conveys the regal beauty of Damian’s Latin, which was among the best of
the Middle Ages. Pierre Payer’s translation in 1982 was the first translation of the book
into any language, and Payer did a good job with what he had, but unfortunately he only
had access to a faulty edition of the book from the 17th century that heavily altered
Damian’s original text. The translation of Owen Blum, published in the 1990s, was
based on the original manuscripts but is very loose and not rigorously faithful to the
text, and is buried inside a complete edition of Damian’s letters without any explanatory
material.

My translation seeks to bring a scrupulously accurate translation to a wide audience of

Catholic readers in a way that preserves the beauty of Damian’s excellent Latin original.
It is thoroughly footnoted to explain difficulties that modern readers might have in
understanding the text. The translation is based on a careful reading of the definitive
critical edition of Kurt Reindel, which is derived from the manuscripts dating back to
the 11th century, and is prefaced with a biographical introduction and an extensive
translator’s preface. So I would say that this edition makes Damian’s work truly
accessible to a wide Catholic readership in a way that the others do not.

CWR: What are some notable similarities between St. Peter Damian’s time and the
situation in the Church today? Differences?

Hoffman: Anyone reading the book will see parallels between the eleventh century
Church and our own situation today. We have also suffered a terrible crisis of
effeminacy and moral laxity among the clergy, which in our case is accompanied by a
generalized indifference to the integrity of Catholic doctrine and serious liturgical
abuse. The sex abuse crisis, which is even worse today than it was in the eleventh
century, has done terrible harm to thousands of innocent children and has damaged the
Church’s reputation immensely. In this sense, Damian seems to be speaking to us across
the span of centuries and calling us to repentance, just as he did so boldly in the
eleventh century.

The big difference between the two periods, aside from the vastly different social
context, is found in the causes of the respective crises. In the eleventh century the cause
was the weakening of the papacy and of the hierarchical structure of the Church by the
political chaos and breakdown of authority during the preceding two centuries. The
popes began to recover their authority in the middle of the eleventh century and boldly
asserted that authority against a deeply entrenched opposition, and eventually they won.
We also face a crisis of authority today, but the cause is in this case an interior one,
deriving from the unwillingness of many prelates to exercise their authority in defense
of the faith and morals of the Church. The Catholic Church today does not suffer so
much from the meddling of secular powers but from an internal crisis marked by an
ambivalence about the very identity and mission of the Church itself. In that sense, it
would seem to even more grave than the crisis of the eleventh century.

The Book of Gomorrah and St. Peter Damian’s Struggle Against Ecclesiastical
Corruption
by St. Peter Damian; foreword by Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Archbishop
Emeritus of Guadalajara
Translator and author of introduction: Matthew Cullinan Hoffman
Ite ad Thomam Books and Media (New Braunfels, TX), 2015
Softcover, 165 pages
Webpage: BookofGomorrah.com (also available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and
many other bookseller sites).