Dirty Old Monk

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"Cor, what a lovely bit of stuff. I'd like to get my fingers around those knockers." —Reverend Ronald Simms, the Dirty Vicar of St Michael's, Monty Python's Flying Circus

A holy man, or a man pretending to be one (it is often hard to tell an ordained hypocrite from a shameless impostor), who, despite being ostensibly above such worldly desires, is one of the most perverted members of the cast, far more lecherous than any layperson. He's constantly eyeing up and making passes at girls, and often has a sizable stash of skin mags or other pornography.

The depiction of such characters varies widely between Western and Eastern works; while manga and anime will often play it for laughs with Buddhist (or pseudo-Buddhist) monk/priest characters, Western works will usually portray such characters as depraved, hypocritical, and often outright predatory (cf. Pedophile Priest).

Subtrope of Nun-Too-Holy. May overlap with Sexy Priest, in which case it's the Spear Counterpart to Naughty Nuns.

Examples of Dirty Old Monks include:

Anime and Manga

• Keisei and Umehara from Shikabane Hime.
• Miroku from Inuyasha. He would touch other girls butts and every time he meets a woman, he would ask, "Would you bear my children?" even the demons.
  • It's actually In the Blood, sort-of: his grandfather was once defeated and cursed by Naraku, who appared to him as a beautiful woman. Add how Miroku was raised by yet another Dirty Old Monk after his father died, and is it any wonder that he turned out to be the local Handsome Lech?
• Ikkou Satonaka, the monastic protagonist of Ah My Buddha, can access a Super Mode fueled by lust for the many attractive Miko he lives with.
• Yuki's brother from Gravitation.
• Benkei Musashibo from New Getter Robo.
• Sailor Moon: Sailor Mars' grandfather, who is a Shinto priest, but is definitely not above making lewd remarks towards Mars' friends.

Film

• The drunken monk in Princess Mononoke.
• Martin Luther in a Deleted Scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
• Friar Carl in Van Helsing, but technically he's only a friar, so that makes it okay.

Literature

• Zephaniah Cromwell in Cloud of Sparrows, though he conceals it so well that other characters believe him to be Asexual.
• The Friar, Summoner, Pardoner, and Monk (although he's more of a Sexy Priest version) from The Canterbury Tales. Perhaps also the Nun's Priest, but he denies it.
• The Decameron starts with the fourth story on the first day (which involves not one but two monks being naughty), and doesn't really let up after that (not that every story involves a lecherous monk, but many do).
• Padre Damaso in Noli me Tangere.
• Much of Frollo's villainy in The Hunchback of Notre Dame is driven by his lust for Esmerelda.
• There are actually two of these in one of the Genevieve stories from Kim Newman: Antonio Udolpho, a monk of Ranald, disgraced because this trope, and the Kislevite revolutionary Prince Piotr Kloszowski (who is only pretending to be a priest of Morr, the god of dreams and death). Of course, since the Cold Stark House of Udolpho is cursed to be an eternal Death Is Cheap Soap Opera until its immortal patriarch dies.
• In the French Sci Fi novel Malevil, the main character recalls his childhood priest. The Abbè Lebas is completely uninterested in the non-sexual confessions of the pre-teen boys and dismisses them with an impatient "Yes, yes. What else?". However, he wants every detail of any dirty thought or sexual action the boys might have to confess.

Live-Action TV

• Friar Bellows, one of the seven wickedest men in England, from The Black Adder.
  • From Blackadder II, The Baby-Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells.
• The Dirty Vicar in Monty Python's Flying Circus.
• Father Jack from Father Ted.

Music

• "Young Eucharists" by Parenthetical Girls may have one as the narrator.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myth and Legend

• A stock character in Chinese and Japanese folklore, and maybe in other places where Buddhism is a popular religion. When it's Played for Laughs, it might be a case of Obsfuscating Stupidity. The other times, it's to teach young monks of the danger of lust (usually involving some kind of literal man-eating shapeshifter demons).

Theatre

• The possible Ur Example and definite Trope Codifier is the title character of Molière's Tartuffe. The entire plot of the play revolves around Tartuffe's lechery and general hypocrisy.
  • Might be even older, as the lecherous cleric is a stock character appearing in many a French farce from the middle-ages.

Video Games

• Thoroughly Averted in the Girls Love Visual Novel Aoi Shiro with the Cool Old Guy Suzuki Yuukai. You'd think an old man living alone in a rural temple would be a lot more... invigorated being surrounded by blooming, beautiful high-school girls. To be fair, Suzuki is an acquaintance of the father of the girls' teacher, so he views them (including said teacher) as granddaughters. He does become Nekata TsuNami's adoptive grandfather in some routes.
• One sidequest in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has the Fateless One searching all of Amalur for an old monk's collection of ribald literature.

Real Life

• Most Westerners (and probably many in other countries as well) are well aware of the cases of child molestation by Catholic priests in the past couple decades.
• Christian monks in the Middle Ages were known to frequent (and occasionally even run) brothels and use their social influence to coerce women into sex.
  • In some cases, there was a reason that the Church ran the brothels: the law required them to do so. In the Middle Ages, majority opinion was that prostitution could not be eliminated, so it was best for a trusted institution — the Church — to ensure that it happened safely and safely out of sight (i.e. in the Red Light District). The monks may or may not have actually been customers.
    • Male sexuality was seen as "a mighty river that could not be tamed," and use of a prostitute was thought to be a far better option than extramarital affairs.
  • Stories and jokes about lustful monks and friars were about as popular in the Middle Ages as stories about greedy lawyers in modern America. They shouldn't necessarily be taken as historical fact.
• Speaking of the Middle Ages, there were several periods where the corruption of the Church reached all the way to the top:
  • The tenth and early eleventh centuries were known as the "pornocracy" (="rule of the prostitutes") in Rome, when the Pope's mistresses (frequently Roman nobles) and their friends (frequently the mistresses' brothers) ran Rome and the Church "by means fair and foul." At about the same time, discipline in the lower ranks was also notoriously bad, with priests, monks, and bishops regularly indulging in luxuries and other things that really ought to be off-limits to one who has taken vows of chastity and poverty.
  • During The Renaissance, the Popes were once again taking mistresses and generally behaving badly. While the most famous for his womanizing (and other things) is Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), the other Popes of the era got in on the act, as well. At the same time, most priests and lower-level ecclesiastics were not half as bad, but many bishops, most archbishops, and pretty much all the cardinals engaged in lives of luxury, intrigue, nepotism, and multiple mistresses. However, the Reformation (and consequent Counter-Reformation) put the kibosh on all that with the new rule that clergy had to be celibate and could no longer own property.
• A Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka was arrested in 2008 for running a brothel.