How has the Catholic Church attitude to same-sex relationships developed and changed?

Early Church: Influence of Church Fathers

• Position on homosexuality built on scripture, stark contrast to Greek and roman attitudes towards same-sex reations including the usually erotic homosexual relationship→ Pederasty (adult male and teenage male)

• ‘John Chrysotom’- archbishop of Constantinople loathed homosexuality ‘[the men] have done an insult to nature itself(..) more disgraceful(..) when even the women seek after these intercourses, who ought to have more shame then men’

• homosexuality as a worse sin than murder, evil

Early Church Council

• 4th cen council of elvira

• excluding male homosexuals from the holy communion

• genitals amputated, humiliation, dying from these injuries, castration

Medieval and Early Modern period

• Pope Leo IX labelled homosexuality in the 11cen as ‘filthy, ‘execrable vice’

• Aquinas- homosexuality is 2nd to

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