As gay men and lesbian women increasingly gained recognition and acceptance in twentieth-century literature and film, and subsequently in social and political movements, the Catholic Church reacted by subtly moving away from its overt condemnation of homosexuality as an urgent moral problem and toward tacitly shunning homosexuality as an "unspeakable vice." In this revealing history, Francesco Torchiani reconstructs the Catholic Church's shifting attitudes toward homosexuality during this period by drawing on a vast array of internal documents and external accounts. This monograph expands the scholarship on the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality in terms of both method and content, ultimately concluding that the Catholic Church continues to wholeheartedly condemn homosexuality despite making genuine efforts to reflect on and understand its social and cultural impact. The Unspeakable Vice therefore sheds new light on and places into historical perspective the questions the Catholic Church continues to reckon with regarding its role in contemporary society.
Francesco Torchiani is an associate professor of contemporary history in the Department of Humanities at the University of Pavia. He is the author of Gaetano Salvemini: Impegno intellettuale e lotta politica (Gaetano Salvemini: Intellectual Commitment and Political Struggle). Johanna Bishop's book-length translations include Luca Cesari's The Discovery of Pasta: A History in Ten Dishes; Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi's Germans, Italians, and Jews: The Police Forces of Occupied Italy, 1943-1945; and Ilaria Pavan's Beyond the Things Themselves: Economic Aspects of the Italian Race Laws (1938-2018).
Introduction Part I: From Sodomy to Homosexuality 1. A Vice "Particularly Odious to God" 2. The Sin That "Cries for Vengeance" 3. After Kinsey 4. A Disease? Part II: "Intrinsically Disordered" Acts 5. Judging for Oneself 6. Persona Humana 7. "Morally Wrong" Behavior 8. Christianity and Tolerance 9. The Iron Prefect 10. "God's Punishment"? 11. An Impossible Right 12. Nonnegotiable Principles Epilogue: Francis, a Turning Point? Acknowledgments Notes Index
"This is undoubtedly the best survey of Catholicism's attitude toward homosexuality. A superb scholarly accomplishment, elegantly written and highly readable." - Enzo Traverso, Cornell University "The best introduction we have at the moment to the forever problematic, always complex, never unambiguous relations of the Catholic Church and Catholicism to homosexuals of the faith." - Victoria de Grazia, Columbia University
