Victor R. Claveau, MJ
When the people of Sodom and Gomorrah had given themselves up to sins of impurity, the evil of their crime was so great that, as the Scripture says, it cried out to heaven for vengeance (Gen. 18:20; 19:13). As a result, God showed his anger, “Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground” (Gen. 19:24-25). Thus, that country, which before was “like the garden of the Lord” (paradise) (Gen. 13:10), was turned into a lake of stinking water, as tradition has it, which remains to this day as an eternal reminder of the loathing God has for the sins of uncleanness.
So, the answer to the question is that sodomy was the sin for which Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God. The term includes all sins of unnatural lust, particularly those committed between persons of the same sex, and all practices aiming at the prevention of conception. Various distinctions, of no consequence here, are made by moral theology. But it always remains repugnant, unnatural lust that cries to heaven for vengeance.
Saint Peter Damian was the first and only Bishop and Doctor of the Church to write a specific treatise on the grave sin of sodomy, a term which is broadly interpreted by him to include the solitary sin of masturbation, masturbation with another, stimulation between thighs, Onanism (contraception), bestiality, sodomy, that is, penetration of the rear of an adult by an adult male, and pederasty, that is, sexual relations between a male adult homosexual and an adolescent boy. The language Damian employs in describing the various acts of sexual perversion is explicit and clear, as are the punishments he assigns to the specific practices mentioned above.
In his Book of Gomorrah, Saint Peter Damian first attacks the problem of clerical moral laxity and sexual perversions from the top down beginning with members of the Catholic hierarchy, that is, bishops and religious superiors who turn a blind eye to the moral depravity within the ranks of clerics and monks under their rule.
When he speaks of “do-nothing” superiors, the reader can almost feel the earth shake under him:
Listen, you do-nothing superiors of clerics and priests. Listen, and even though you feel sure of yourselves, tremble at the thought that you are partners in the guilt of others; those, I mean, who wink at the sins of their subjects that need correction and who by ill-considered silence allow them license to sin. Listen, I say, and be shrewd enough to understand that all of you alike are deserving of death, that is, not only those who do such things, but also, they who approve those who practice them (Rom 1:32).
Having launched that thunderbolt, Damian then attacks, with even more vehemence, those reprobate bishops and religious superiors who themselves are guilty of heinous sodomitic acts and who prostitute their own spiritual sons – seminarians, priests and monks under their care.
Those bishops who “commit these absolutely damnable acts with their spiritual sons.”… “Who can expect the flock to prosper when its shepherd has sunk so deep into the bowels of the devil … Who will make a mistress of a cleric, or a woman of a man? … Who, by his lust, will consign a son whom he spiritually begotten for God to slavery under the iron law of Satanic tyranny,” Damian thunders. Drawing an analogy between the sentence inflicted on the father who engages in familial incest with his daughter or the priest who commits “sacrilegious intercourse” with a nun, with the defilement of a cleric by his superior, he asks if the latter should escape condemnation and retain his holy office? Actually, the latter case deserves an even worse punishment says Damian, because whereas the prior two cases involved natural intercourse, a religious superior guilty of sodomy has not only committed a sacrilege with his spiritual son but has also violated the law of nature. Such a superior damns not only his own soul but takes another with him.