Posted on 04/13/2021 2:08:36 PM PDT by ebb tide
In this phase of growing, thunderous rejection - especially on Germanic ground - of the “Responsum” of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith against the blessing of homosexual couples, it is startling to know that in Rome “five centuries ago there were marriages between men in church”, As Settimo Cielo documented in a previous post.
In effect, same-sex unions have always speckled the history of the Church, which has always condemned them. But that such unions should aspire to be recognized as good and legitimate by a liturgical blessing is a novelty of these times. With very rare precedents.
One of these precedents is precisely that reported by Michel de Montaigne (see illustration) in a passage of his “Journal de Voyage en Italie” dated 1581, which Settimo Cielo has reproduced in its entirety.
Montaigne wrote that in a church in Rome, that of San Giovanni a Porta Latina, "during the Mass there were marriages between men with the same ceremonies that we use for our weddings: they took communion together, they read the same nuptial Gospel, and then they slept and lived together. "
And in their justification they argued that “since the other union of men with women was made legitimate only by the circumstance of marriage, [...] this other act would also become legitimate in the same way, if the rites and mysteries of the Church had authorized it.”
At the time that episode, which ended with the death sentence of eight of them, made quite a stir. But then a sort of supression was exercised on it. The distinguished historian of the Church Ludwig von Pastor, in his famous “History of the Popes” published in 1929, does indeed quote Montaigne but downgrades this to an episode of “rogues” who went back to Judaism and were tried for apostasy.
Instead, it is more than ever useful to reconstruct its real development, given the striking similarity with today’s claims of legitimate and blessed homosexual unions. And this is what can be done on the basis of research published by historians such as Nello Vian in 1967 and Giuseppe Marcocci in 2010.
The documentation available today is provided by three substantial passages from the proceedings of the trial, by the contemporary dispatches sent by the representatives of the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Urbino in Rome, by the registers of the Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato which assisted the condemned, and by a couple of subsequent testimonies.
And here is what happened.
*
It was the summer of 1578, three years before Montaigne reported it in his travelogue. On the morning of July 20, a Sunday, Mass was celebrated as usual in the Roman church of San Giovanni in Porta Latina. The attendees were of various ages, all males and from different nations, many Iberians, some Italians, one Albanian. They were mostly laymen, with some clerics and three “hermits,” all of modest social status. They had been meeting for a year or two and had formed a sort of confraternity, in which the Portuguese Marcos Pinto and the Spaniard Alfonso de Robles had a prominent role. There was also a small group of Jews who attended that church on the sabbath.
Among all there were consenting homosexual relationships: stable and with a marked sentimental imprint as between Robles and the Albanian boatman Battista, or more often discontinuous as between Pinto and the three young “hermits,” or yet again with a marked difference between the roles, with one of the two acting as “commare,” the feminine role. But the celebration of “marriages” was of capital importance to all of them. The Council of Trent had just ended, which in the “Tametsi” decree had imposed the public celebration of the sacrament of marriage in the church. And this was also the desire of the confraternity of San Giovanni a Porta Latina, a desire they knew could not be granted by society and the Church of the time but which they wanted to satisfy on their own, also applying to their unions between males the solemn nuptial rite. An attitude heralding today's blessings for couples and, of course, completely different from the carnivalesque one of one group of clerics and young males discovered in Naples in 1591 who parodied wedding rites with irreverent and scurrilous staging.
Well then, that Sunday at San Giovanni a Porta Latina a “wedding” was planned, immediately after Mass, between a young Spaniard and a certain Brother Joseph. But he fell ill and did not arrive. But the celebratory banquet, which had been carefully prepared, was still held in the quarters adjacent to the church. And at the end the company, conversing, climbed the tower to admire the panorama of Rome. When suddenly the cops stormed in.
Amid the stampede eleven of them were captured and immediately locked up in the cells of Corte Savella. The Holy Office did not see to their trial, despite the manifest heresy of those nuptial rites celebrated between males. Indeed, perhaps precisely in order not to embark on a theological controversy with such unpredictable effects, the supreme tribunal of doctrine stayed away from it, the opposite of what it would go on to do with the “Responsum” five centuries later. The task was left to the Governorate Criminal Court, which was able to proceed quickly and firmly, limiting itself only to the sodomy that at the time was a very serious crime. The interrogations were conducted with the unfortunates strung up and branded. Two were spared for responding properly; another, a priest, escaped through benefit of clergy. Eight were sentenced to death.
The night between August 12 and 13 1578 the eight were entrusted to the comforters of the Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato. They repented, made a will concerning their few belongings, went to confession. At dawn they attended Mass “and they all received Holy Communion devoutly.” In procession they reached Ponte Sant'Angelo and there they were hanged. Then the comforters loaded their bodies onto a cart and took them to Porta Latina, to the scene of the crime, where they were burned.
But their story did not disappear in a flash. When Montaigne visited Rome it was on everyone’s lips. Nine years later, in 1587, during the canonization cause of Fra Felice da Cantalice, six witnesses reported that a pious winemaker in the service of one of them had seen hell in the manner of Dante, with “those Spaniards who were burned in Porta Latina” in the bolge of the damned, and had escaped from ending up in their midst thanks to the invocation of Fra Felice.
And forty years later, in 1618, the Venetian scribe Giacomo Castellani, the Italian translator of Bartolomé de Las Casas, warned in one of his pamphlets that in Rome, in San Giovanni a Porta Latina, he had seen painted “the story of those Spaniards who, having brought some youngsters with them, in that holy church married them as if they were women.”
That painting has disappeared, but the “story” continues today more than ever. With a predominantly Germanic accent. And with the Holy Office this time committed directly and almost alone to stopping the assault, with the sole frail weapon of its word.
Ping
They can live, partner up and have the same gender sex but a holy matrimony it can never be. Not according to Biblical Scripture - one can accept that or reject it but it’s what is as written.
People bring all sorts of animals these days to church for “blessings”. The Germans no doubt can’t see the difference in blessing a pet reptile and a homosexual couple living in biblical sin.
The Holy Office (under the Pope) did not exercise a decision, but it seems the government of the Papal States (under the Pope) did. I don’t know what is unclear about death sentences. Is the writer of the article encouraging the a replication of the Renaissance state of affairs that resulted in the silence of the Holy Office concerning the criminals and the execution of the very same said criminals? Is the writer of the article arguing for a Church-State relation that obtained in Renaissance Italy?
You cannot bless two people who are doing something foul and abnormal. They would love for the church to bless their actions but they cannot. Sexual perverts want to propagandize that what they are doing is okay, but it is not!
Holy “Office”... ?
Wow!
They have names for ALL their parts, right ?
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