Gay Medieval Monks?

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Easy – there is absolutely no proof provided that this had anything to do with same-sex unions.
 
Wow. I’m not really surprised by seeing people say that the monastic lifestyle is homosexual but they are very, very, very wrong.

Monks lived in a life of chastity where they were in a spiritual brotherhood with the men in the monastery. It was not at all a same-sex union because they were united under God and there was no attraction whatsoever. This professor is really not that smart for writing such rubbish that anyone can understand as being wrong.
 
I’m sure that some gays have fled to the monastic life in past and present times, most likely with good intent. I’m sure, also, that some hanky panky has occured, past and present, as temptation was ever present, and some men and women ended up in carnal relationships.
 
I don’t see a problem. Strong male friendships were common in the past, and still today in some parts of the world. One could imagine such were the relationships between Christ and the apostles. But the modern western mind, especially if pushing a gay agenda, cannot fathom that such relationships did not involve sex. In other words, the modern western mind can no longer fathom pure male/male friendship. Oddly, I think it can still fathom pure female/female friendship, at least for now.
 
I guess one response is, “this is twenty-year-old news. If there were a shred of evidence that this was ‘same-sex marriage,’ don’t you think folks would be shouting it from the rooftops?”

Another might be, “you know, ‘united not by nature but by faith and a holy spirit’ sounds clear enough to me. Not by nature – that is, not in the way our human nature binds man and woman – but only by faith. Not by a spirit of sinfulness, but by a holy spirit. There’s nothing in there that suggests sexuality in the least – rather, it suggests that they’re saying that sexuality (i.e., nature) is explicitly not part of this blessing!”
 
Country_Gal said:
I’m sure that some gays have fled to the monastic life in past and present times, most likely with good intent. I’m sure, also, that some hanky panky has occured, past and present, as temptation was ever present, and some men and women ended up in carnal relationships.
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Two thoughts:

First, it seems to me that the OP has inserted the idea of ‘monks’ into this story he cited – reading through it, I don’t recall seeing anything that suggested that this referred specifically to consecrated religious.

Second, even if people with homosexual inclinations fled to religious life in various periods of time, this does not in the least imply the claim that the Church supported, approved, or solemnized their relationships!
 
This was written by a bishop.

“This flesh is now so smooth, so milky, so unblemished,
So good, so handsome, so supple, so tender.
Yet the time will come when it will become ugly and rough,
When this flesh, dear boyish flesh, will become worthless.
Therefore, while you flower, take up riper practices.
While you are in demand and able, be not slow to yield to an eager lover.
For this you will be prized, not made less of.
These words of my request, most beloved,
Are sent to you alone; do not show them to many others.”

Is this true?
 
FireFromHeaven said:
This was written by a bishop.

“This flesh is now so smooth, so milky, so unblemished,
So good, so handsome, so supple, so tender.
Yet the time will come when it will become ugly and rough,
When this flesh, dear boyish flesh, will become worthless.
Therefore, while you flower, take up riper practices.
While you are in demand and able, be not slow to yield to an eager lover.
For this you will be prized, not made less of.
These words of my request, most beloved,
Are sent to you alone; do not show them to many others.”

Is this true?
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What Bishop? What is the source?
 
FireFromHeaven said:
This was written by a bishop.

“This flesh is now so smooth, so milky, so unblemished,
So good, so handsome, so supple, so tender.
Yet the time will come when it will become ugly and rough,
When this flesh, dear boyish flesh, will become worthless.
Therefore, while you flower, take up riper practices.
While you are in demand and able, be not slow to yield to an eager lover.
For this you will be prized, not made less of.
These words of my request, most beloved,
Are sent to you alone; do not show them to many others.”

Is this true?
Click to expand...
Sure, there was probably a flaming Bishop or two who abused hia position, preying on young men. Same has happened in modern times. But it goes against Church policy nevertheless. _
 
I’d like to see the entire text of the Rite, rather than just a snippet that can easily and conveniently be interpreted to mean some sort of same-sex union rite.
 
FireFromHeaven said:
This was written by a bishop.

“This flesh is now so smooth, so milky, so unblemished,
So good, so handsome, so supple, so tender.
Yet the time will come when it will become ugly and rough,
When this flesh, dear boyish flesh, will become worthless.
Therefore, while you flower, take up riper practices.
While you are in demand and able, be not slow to yield to an eager lover.
For this you will be prized, not made less of.
These words of my request, most beloved,
Are sent to you alone; do not show them to many others.”

Is this true?
Click to expand...
It is up to you to provide the source otherwise how can you expect anyone to comment on it.
 
FireFromHeaven said:
This was written by a bishop.

“This flesh is now so smooth, so milky, so unblemished,
So good, so handsome, so supple, so tender.
Yet the time will come when it will become ugly and rough,
When this flesh, dear boyish flesh, will become worthless.
Therefore, while you flower, take up riper practices.
While you are in demand and able, be not slow to yield to an eager lover.
For this you will be prized, not made less of.
These words of my request, most beloved,
Are sent to you alone; do not show them to many others.”

Is this true?
Click to expand...
If a clergyman did write this, so what? Also, which line(s) in here are pro-homosexual? It sounds like someone talking about the eventual corruption of the body.
 
Re: the “same sex marriage” rite, it’s not. It’s a sort of religious version of a blood-brotherhood or blood-sisterhood rite. You adopt a brother (if a monk) or sister (if a nun) in religion. The Irish did this, and the Orthodox/Eastern folks still do. Read the links, find out all about it.

Re: the quote, it’s unsourced. So I’ll run a search… ah, it’s Bishop Marbod/Marbodus of Rennes. The quote is from a set of two poems describing the ideal of young beauty (of a girl and of a boy), praises them primarily in an androgynous way (because they’re kids), and talks about how everything physically beautiful about them is bound to decay, so they’d better do something with their lives to become permanently beautiful with Christ’s eternal life (using a twist on the typical trope of “gather ye rosebuds while ye may”). Needless to say, this is not how academics read his poems.

He wrote a lot of poems, and a lot of them seem to have dealt with topics of love or of the distinction between chaste and unchaste behavior (such as a life of St. Thais the ex-prostitute). There’s use of Latin rhyme, and there seems to be some kind of literary connection with the troubadours.

He also wrote a poem talking about the wrongness of homosexual activity.

Honestly, sounds pretty standard. Haven’t read his work, but I imagine that a lot of “creepy or not” depends on the creepiness of the translator.

It is of course possible that a monk poet could also be a wicked monk, or that favoritism or concealment of wickedness might allow a wicked man to be chosen a bishop. Sadly, we’ve seen that in our own time, with pedophiles and all manner of unfitting and abusive people in the clergy and religious life. It’s sad when it happens, but humans do sin.

Monasteries were generally set up to make illicit sexual behavior difficult or impossible. For example, many monasteries had every man (or woman, if it was a nun monastery) sleep in a single large dormitory room with individual separate beds, had a candle or oil lamp burning at all times, forbade anybody eyeing or touching anybody in the dorm unless somebody was sick; and of course they had to get up several times a night to sing the night Hours, so everybody had to sleep in their clothes. (And they’d all been working or studying or singing all day, so they were happy to sleep their few hours in the night. A lot of orders had afternoon nap/siesta time for a bit, though.)

Orders with separate cells had different regs, but there was a lot of rest-time supervision by the various internal officials of the monastery, and officials changed fairly often when convents and monasteries held elections.

This isn’t to say that stuff never happened, but the orders certainly weren’t set up to promote hanky-panky.
 
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