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 "Q.  What are the punishments imposed on sodomites?

A.  This execrable crime is punished in the first instance by divine law with the death penalty:  If a man sleeps with a man as with a woman, both have committed an abomination and they shall be put to death (Lev. 20.13).  St Paul assigns the same penalty of death in Rom. 1 not only to those who commit this detestable offence but also to those who consent to it.  According to St Thomas [Aquinas], every sodomite died before the night of the Lord's birth, so that the nature which he assumed should not be defiled with such impurity.  The lifeless sea washed over the locations of Sodom and Gomorrah, so that the land infected by that crime should not be seen any longer.

"Sodom and Gomorrah"

by Gillis Mostaert, 1597 A.D.

By human law, even among the gentiles, sodomites were punished with the penalty of death by burning.  According to the civil law in the Liber Authenticarum, they are similarly subject to the death penalty.  Under Spanish law, they are deservedly punished with death by burning and the confiscation of their property. Canon law punishes sodomitical laymen with the penalty of excommunication.  In a constitution published in 1568, Pius V decreed that clerics, whether regular or secular, apart from the other punishments inflicted by the common law, should lose their office and be handed over to the secular power."

(Source: Extracted from "Compendium Salmanticense in Duos Tomos Distributum
Universae Theologiae Moralis", by Fr. Antonio de San José, 1779 A.D., Imprimatur)

Note: The Cursus Theologicus Moralis Salmanticensis was prepared by Discalced Carmelites from the Colegio de San Elías de Salamanca (the same College where the great Salamanca Dogmatic Theology Course was also written). The Moral Salamancans consist of six thick volumes and an appendix, published between 1665 and 1753, reissued several times (the last edition in Venice 1764). Fifteen years after the last Venetian edition, the Carmelite *Fr. Antonio de San José (1716-1794) prepared a Compendium Salmanticense in duos tomos distributum universae Theologiae Moralis, which was published in Rome in 1779. 

*Fr. Antonio de San José was a Discalced Spanish Carmelite religious, born in 1716 in Echano (Vizcaya) and died in Burgos in 1794. Within his order he was reader, prior, synodal examiner in the archbishopric of Burgos and attorney general of the Congregation of Spain and the Indies in Rome.

"Aids is a chastisement from God." 

                                                    -Gregory XVII ("Siri")

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