UNITED STATES
aka Catholic
By Randy Engel
ntroduction
February 23rd on the traditional Roman Catholic calendar is the feast day of one of the greatest saints in the Church, Saint Peter Damian (1007 – 1072), an Italian Benedictine monk and hermit, Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia, a precursor of the Hildebrandine reform in the Church, a key figure in the moral and spiritual reformation of the lax and incontinent clergy of his time and a Doctor of the Church.
I first made the acquaintance of Saint Peter Damian in 2002 when I was researching the history of sodomy and pederasty in the Church in the Middle Ages for The Rite of Sodomy. When I obtained Damian’s treatise Liber Gornorrhianus (The Book of Gomorrah) written sometime between 1049 and 1054, as an inter-loan acquisition from Catholic University of America, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Indeed, heaven or Paradiso was where Dante has placed the saintly Peter Damian near the end of his Canto XXI (Seventh Heaven: Sphere of Saturn) in his epic literary masterpiece, the Divine Comedy.
So impressed was I with Peter Damian’s work, that I took two months off from my research to pen a two-part series for Catholic Family News (June/July 2002) titled, “St. Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrah – A Moral Blueprint for Our Times.” Later, I expanded the article for inclusion in The Rite of Sodomy. Today, fourteen years later, this article continues to be the most popular reprint on the New Engel Publishing website.
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