Randy Engel: The Rite of Sodomy: Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church
New Engel Publishing, Export Pennsylvania, 2006, 1282 pages.

This will be a multi-part ongoing review because of the length of the book, and will be "value-neutral", my intention being to inform NCR bloggers about its content, and to stimulate discussion.

The book is divided into five major sections, which are in turn subdivided into chapters, each of which is followed by extensive notes. In addition, there is an Epilogue, Prayers, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index. The table of contents:

I Historical Perspective
1 Antiquity
2 The Early Church
3 The Renaissance
4 Homosexuality and the Rise of the Modern State
5 The Homintern and the Cambridge Spies

II Male Homosexuality---the Individual and the Collective
6 Its Nature and Causes
7 Male Homosexual Behaviors
8 Pedophilia, Pederasty, and Male Intergenerational Sex
9 The Homosexual Collective

III Amchurch and the Homosexual Revolution
10 AmChurch---Posing a Historical Framework
11 The Bishops' Bureaucracy and the Homosexual Revolution
12 The Cardinal O'Connell and Cardinal Spellman Legacy

IV The Homosexualization of Amchurch
13 The Homosexual Network in AmChurch
14 Homosexual Bishops and the Diocesan Homosexual Network
15 The Special Case of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin
16 Homosexuality in Religious Orders
17 New Ways Ministry---A Study in Subversion

V The Vatican and the Final Pieces of the Puzzle
18 Twentieth Century Harbingers
19 Pope Paul VI and the Church's Paradigm Shift on Homosexuality

Epilogue

Prayers

Selected Bibliography

Index

The author, director of the U.S. Coalition for Life, relates in her introduction that the genesis of this book occurred when a Catholic lay newspaper censored her reference to bishops in a serialized version of her book about sex education.

In the first chapter, Engel surveys homosexual practices in antiquity, briefly mentioning Babylon’s and Egypt’s polytheistic worship of Baal and Dyonysus before moving on to the Hebrews.
She covers ancient Greece and Sparta next, and I found this part of the chapter fascinating because of the complex, not to say Byzantine, social arrangements regarding homosexuality and homosexual practices that developed in Classical Athens.
Next, she details the practices that developed in ancient Rome. The chapter concludes with an examination of the testimony of Professor of Philosophy Martha Nussbaum and Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy John Finnis during the Colorado Supreme Court Case of Evans v. Romer. There are 120 entries in the Notes section that follows this chapter, which appear to be a treasure trove of information no matter which side of the issue one is on.
The text is graceful and straightforward, but the author has a definite point of view, a point of view I share.

Next Installment: The Early Church