*Vicissitudes of the Oedipal Organization, and Their Impact on the Anticlerical Polemic DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107392*

Everywhere, enraged feminists confront allegedly male chauvinistic institutions and pro-family activists, while souverainistes oppose left-wing supported migratory policies and free speech advocates rail against contemporary cancel culture.

Within contemporary society, the orientation of social aggression seems to depend on the position in the Oedipal phantasy, which each group values the most. Specifically, social identity appears nowadays to coalesce around communityshared father's representations. For instance, Antifa activists smite statues of haughty, supercilious sadistic fathers of the nation, while conservatives reverently cherish the teachings of unlimitedly powerful but wise and fair community ancestors.

The heated confrontation between the LGBT community vs. conservative Catholic movements and institutions can offer a particularly straightforward example of a social conflict where such an Oedipal allegiance plays a major and thinly disguised role. The strife between Catholic clergy and LGBT community is an old one. While the Greek-Roman civilization showed a remarkable tolerance vis a vis the most diverse sexual practices, the Saint Apostles and the Church Fathers agreed that only those who resign to compulsory bodily gratifications, including homoerotic sexual pleasures, are able to reach genuine inner freedom. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas censored sodomy as the most serious of sexual misconducts ([7], IIa-IIae q. 154, a. 11 co.).

The confrontation between male Catholic clergy and advocates of free sexual life came to be even more heated in the following centuries, but the power balance piecemeal swung. Seventeenth-century libertines and freemasons led a particularly fierce campaign against Catholic institutions. We can date then the onset of modern anticlerical hate. During French *Terreur*, as well as in various revolutions the world over, Catholic priests were hanged, beheaded, or shot by the thousands.

In this social conflict, sexuality played a core role. Sexual misconduct was everywhere a favorite issue agitated by anticlerical polemicists. While from the pulpit Catholic priests used to rail against sexual freedom, sexual transgression of the clergy was the focus of an apparently inexhaustible public curiosity.

Male homosexual practices and adolescent and child sexual abuse by the clergy had historically been the focus of particularly prominent blame ([8, 9], p. 81–84). Nowadays, in the age of sexual freedom, clergy's sexual misconduct is again a core issue in LGBT activists' polemic against the Church [10]. According to the radicals' perspective, sexual misconduct by the clergy would be the unavoidable product of the impossible striving to maintain sexual abstinence, which is inherent in Christian ascetics [11]. A powerful media campaign is on its way the world over against the Church, which would have covertly promoted child sexual abuse and protected perpetrators. Political supporters of the rights of homosexual people are everywhere on the frontline in this confrontation.

While the judicial fallouts of such a campaign are in the public eye, most advanced western countries are piecemeal including within their legislation some acts punishing those beliefs which could possibly foster sexual-preference-based discrimination. A similar law proposal (commonly referred to as "Zan" law) is now pending at the Italian Parliament. Such laws have elicited enhanced concern and downright opposition in many, often Catholic, traditional-family movements, which obviously perceive them as targeted to suppress their activity.

So, at the dawn of the XXI century, the Catholic Church and homosexual organizations seem to be trapped more than ever in a complex network of reciprocal suspicion and hostility. Which social and emotional forces may lie under such

confrontation? Which conscious and unconscious dynamics may keep each opponent so close to and enraged at the other? Psychoanalysis can help us answer these questions.
