Dirty Old Monk

Monk and Nun by Cornelis van Haarlem, 1591

"My vow of poverty has made me rich, my vow of obedience has made me a lord. My vow of chastity? Ah..."

— Flavor Text for the Abbot, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Career Compendium

A holy man, or a man pretending to be one,^note 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). It isn't that the Europe doesn't have its share of comedic holy lechers though, especially with older works when such humor was easier to stomach.

This is quite an old trope; in Europe, at least, the depravity, greed, and gluttony of monks have been a common theme of both angry screeds and popular jokes and comic literature going back to The Middle Ages.

Not every religion requires its priests (or the equivalent) to be celibate, with some actively encouraging them to marry and have children, and a few (notably Islam) even forbid vows of celibacy. Though it is an inherent aspect of monasticism, so for actual monks to be seeking sexual pleasure will always fit this trope.

Subtrope of Nun Too Holy. May overlap with Sexy Priest, in which case it's the Spear Counterpart to Naughty Nuns. Mostly overlaps with Dirty Old Man and Woman.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• 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.
• Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto is about the son of history's most famous one, and Rodrigo is still at it less than a year before he becomes pope. In the manga, his young mistress Giulia Farnese is living with him.
• Keisei and Umehara from Corpse Princess. Keisei was Makina's Contracted Monk. He was something of a pervert, often offering (or forcing upon) Ouri sexual posters or skin mags. Umehara is known for his perverted nature.
• Benkei Musashibo from the New Getter Robo version of Getter Robo is a former bandit who gave up stealing, fighting, drinking and seducing/raping women after being touched by the kindness and wisdom of a remote mountain temple's Buddhist monks. Despite his desire to change, however, he is still very much ruled by his baser impulses; he revels in combat, loves his food and drink, and leers after beautiful women. When the temple is slaughtered by the oni, he joins the Getter Robo team for revenge, and his "monk" status becomes more or less non-existent. Ironically, it's after this that he actually matures somewhat and becomes closer to the ideal he sought.
• Yuki's brother Tatsuha from Gravitation. Tatsuha is a 16-year-old monk who is obsessed with Ryūichi and watches his Nittle Grasper video repetitively. He's quite the perverted and obsessive fan.
• 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. And it's actually In the Blood, sort of: his grandfather was once defeated and cursed by Naraku, who appeared 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? Somewhat justified though as the curse of the Wind Tunnel will eventually kill him so he only has a limited amount of time to father children if he fails to break it.
• One of the Eleven Supernovas, the most formidable up-and-coming pirates in One Piece, is a man named Urouge. He has received the least focus of the Supernovas, but he seems to be an ex-monk; he wears a torn Buddhist monk outfit and a necklace of prayer beads — furthermore, his pirate epithet is "Mad Monk Urouge", and he's the captain of the "Fallen Monk" pirates. He's also a Birkan, so he has angelic-like vestigial wings. None of this stops him from being a powerful and fearsome pirate, and according to the author, one of his hobbies is "lovemaking".
• Sailor Moon: Sailor Mars' grandfather is a Shinto priest, but is definitely not above making lewd remarks towards his granddaughter's underage friends, and flirts with everyone regardless of gender.
• Father Alexander Anderson from Hellsing is a zigzagged, non-perverted example. He's a bayonet-wielding ordained Catholic priest who likes to ham things up like an Evangelic preacher as he goes slaughtering into battle, where his Slasher Smile and Scary Shiny Glasses make it very obvious he's enjoying himself. However, as a member of the Iscariot Organization, he reserves his bayonets pulled from nowhere for vampires only, along with his . In his off-hours he runs an orphanage where he is truly beloved, and gets into a slight disagreement when his superior decides to cut down innocent people along with vampires; he might not LIKE Protestant England, but he's not a mass murderer.
• Miroku in Inuyasha is an itinerant Buddhist monk who is very good at fighting youkai, but terrible at being a Buddhist, between his incessant skirt-chasing and his habit of conning his way into money and comfortable lodgings whenever possible. This is reasonably historically accurate, given that many monks of the time were incessantly criticized by laymen, both commoners and authorities alike, for doing exactly these things. It was said that there were no worse Buddhists in medieval Japan than among the clergy. Miroku himself manages to stay among the more benevolent examples of the trope and proves to be capable of deep spirituality when the situation is serious... but he's still a terrible Buddhist.
• Sister from Arakawa Under the Bridge, a large-framed, crossdressing man who holds Mass at gunpoint and claims to be a Living Lie Detector, making confessions more like interrogations. He's also almost definitely not an actual holy-person of any religion either - as he seems to think God is Big Boss and his "Bible" is filled with a variety of misquotes from everything to Christian to Buddhist texts. But when you get used to his more frightening habits, it's clear Sister genuinely cares for his community, acting as a source of advice and as a protector for the cast. He also takes care of orphans and feeds the community home-baked cookies.
• Nicholas D. Wolfwood of Trigun is a non-sexual example. He claims to be a travelling Christian priest, yet he drinks, smokes, sells confessional sessions for money, kills both for profit and for expediency, and is the member of a Church Militant in the manga and functionally a Knives priest-in-training in the anime. In the anime, he even admits he's never actually been inside a church before when he stumbles into one to make his last confessions and die.
• Genjyo Sanzo of Saiyuki. A Buddhist priest known for his heavy smoking, easy irritability and general disinterest in giving sermons whenever possible. Also notorious among Youkai for being a killer marksman.
• Randy of Blue Ramun is a priest-healer who oversees the various religious ceremonies, weddings, and funerals in the Lezak District, but his behavior more closely resembles that of a bum than a man of the cloth. He smokes excessively, drinks at all hours of the day, and sleeps through his personal prayers. He'll be the first to point out that he's broken nearly enough rules to get kicked out of the priesthood, but his congregation love and trust him nevertheless. They still remember his work as Captain of the Lezak Guard, a position which he resigned for priesthood after he failed to stop the district's Blue Doctor from performing deadly medical research on his subordinate Eagle's wife. Even with the façade of a lazy, carefree slacker, everyone can tell he's got the best interest of the community in mind and that he's willing to lay down his life to protect them if need be.
• Sai Saichi of Mobile Fighter G Gundam was raised as a Buddhist monk, but for all practical intents and purposes is just a rambunctious teenager who happens to have studied Shaolin kung-fu in a temple. He is chided by his guardians for his complete lack of monkly behavior regularly.

Comic Books

• The "The Mortification of the Flesh" arc in Hellblazer centers around a special room in the Vatican that's been warded off from God's sight, so clergy can satiate their lust there. One particular visitor, Father Grimaldi, claims it's to better understand sin so they can be more faithful, but John sets it straight that it was started because Pope Alexander VI just wanted a place where he could molest little boys.
• Not seen onscreen, but Hob Gadling's story in The Sandman (1989) has as Book Ends (set centuries apart) a joke about a poacher discovering his wife's cheating on him with a member of the clergy, replacing the friar with a vicar.
• Played with in the European comic book series Soda. One book has a (male) small-time criminal who dresses up as a nun for disguise. Of course, Soda himself is a rare male example (and subversion), since he dresses up as a priest to fool his old mother into thinking he is one and not a gun-toting cop.

Films — Animation

• Played for Laughs in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit where the vicar gets busted by Victor Quartermaine for reading a magazine on... nun wrestling.

Films — Live-Action

• In Anazapta, Ian McNeice plays a bishop who offers a Scarpia Ultimatum to a noblewoman whose estate is in debt to the church. He even shows her erotic parchments he's collected at great expense, depicting exactly how she's expected to keep her side of the bargain "in 47 different ways".
• Bedazzled (1967). A cardinal is at the Devil's going away party in his seedy nightclub and hits on Stanley who's in nun drag - earlier on Stanley wonders why the devil doesn't use a pigeon to crap on a clergyman and make him sin with anger; the devil explains 'he's on our side'.
• Brother Belcher in Carry On Up the Khyber who has sex with women in the Indian markets that have "fallen" out of their religion. The soldiers blackmail him into going on the expedition by dangling a pretty wench before him and then catching him in the act.
• Deadtime Stories: In "Peter and the Witches", Peter is easily able to lure the local pastor into the witches' lair with promise of sex with two beautiful young women. When the witches (whom the pastor sees as beautiful young seductresses) place a shackle around his neck, his only reaction is an enthusiastic "A little bondage, eh?".
• Enjo: Tayama, the abbot at a Buddhist monastery has a geisha mistress that he impregnates, and keeps pinups of geisha girls.
• Pain & Gain: Pastor Randy gets violently attacked by Paul after he comes on to him, thus leading Paul on the path toward Daniel and the Sun Gym Gang. He still acts as a source of emotional and spiritual support for Paul when he decides to confess his crimes to the authorities.
• In The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood, Friar Tuck not only indulges in his usual vices of gluttony, drunkenness, and thievery but receives blowjobs from wenches.
• Satan's Cheerleaders has Monk, who gets very excited about the upcoming Virgin Sacrifice. Granted, he is a Satanist monk, but it is implied that he was a Christian monk before he converted to Satanism, and has been celibate his entire life. When an annoyed Sheriff Bubb asks what makes him such an expert on women, Monk replies that he has had a lot of dreams about women.
• One of the fake trailers for Tropic Thunder is "Satan's Alley", which is a parody of Oscar Bait films featuring Kirk Lazarus and Tobey Maguire playing gay monks, complete with an angelic chorus backed by pornographic beats as well as Lazarus's character confessing "I've been a bad bad boy, father".
• Friar Carl in Van Helsing, but technically he's only a friar, so that makes it okay.^note Friars are different from monks in that they travel around rather than staying in a monastery, but the celibacy applies to both.

Folklore

• Ji Gong is a monk infamous for his unorthodox behavior. He openly eats meat and drinks wine, and dresses in filthy, ragged robes. Nonetheless, he's firmly on the side of good, helps the downtrodden and fights injustice. Eventually his monastery kicks him out and forces him to walk the earth, but his reputation as a folk hero remains.

Jokes

• A hunter realizes the local monastery eats rabbit every day despite not raising them, so he asks how they do it. "Well, my son, what you do is this: stick two fingers in a woman's cunny, and then down the rabbit hole. They can't resist the smell, you see." The hunter is surprised but decides to try it out. He goes home, sees his wife scrubbing the floor, and lifts up her dress to do as the monk said, when he hears his wife say "Hunting for rabbits again, Brother?"

Literature

• The Bishop in The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade greatly enjoys sodomy, especially passive sodomy and combining murder with sex. He refuses to have vaginal intercourse.
• Arly Hanks: Brother Verber (a Protestant preacher) spends a lot of time studying pornographic magazines and videos only so as to better understand how the Devil might lead his flock astray (or at least that's what he tells himself).
• Averted for the most part in Brother Cadfael, where monks who do have sexual thoughts about women strive to avoid temptation rather than giving in:
  • Two monks have fathered children (one of them being Cadfael himself), but in both cases, it was before they joined the monastery (and in the second's case, he thought both girl and child had died (a thought encouraged by her mother since she had the hots for him) and waited until he thought he was dying to confess).
  • One brother has a particularly bad case of It's All My Fault after a nun is found raped and murdered. It turns out that he couldn't bear being so close to a sleeping young woman, so that he'd gone outside to stop the thoughts, leaving her defenseless against the criminal.
  • An adolescent charged with bringing a young widow a rose every year as rent asks to be relieved of this duty as he'd fallen in love with her and can't bear the idea of only seeing him once a year. His problem is solved when he's found dead.
• The Friar, Summoner, Pardoner, and Monk from The Canterbury Tales. The Pardoner isn't technically a clergyman, but he makes a brisk business selling indulgences and fake artifacts, and is heavily implied to be homosexual. The Monk doesn't even pretend to follow his monastic vows (he claims it's because he's "modern") so he's more of a Sexy Priest version. The Friar tries to hide his wenching but is so transparent that no one is fooled, and he and the Summoner, who is similarly hypocritical, trade barbs with each other over it. Perhaps also the Nun's Priest, but he denies it.
• Zephaniah Cromwell in Cloud of Sparrows, though he conceals it so well that other characters believe him to be asexual.
• There are actually two of these in The Cold Stark House, one of the Genevieve Undead stories from Kim Newman: Antonio Udolpho, a monk of Ranald, disgraced because of 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).
• Thomas in The Crowner John Mysteries is a cripple who used to be a priest as his deformities left him no real career opportunities except the Church. However, his weakness for the sins of the flesh got him defrocked after an attempted liaison with the daughter of a noble. Now a mere clerk, he continues to lech after pretty women but without success.
• 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. Of course, it's not that every story involves a lecherous monk, but many do—and if a monk is in a story, you can bet your bottom dollar that he's up to no good. Or that he's an idiot.
• Discworld:
  • The unfortunate brother Nhumrod from Small Gods is tormented every waking moment (and even worse in his sleeping moments) by thoughts of a luxurious nature. As he's also the master of the novitiates, he is always reminding them of the dangers of this sin (according to the older novitiates, asking him about it is quite educational, especially when he starts foaming at the mouth).
  • Snuff has the Ramkin property hermit, who uses his yearly two-week vacation to go to Quirm and ensure that the fine tradition of herming is passed down from father to son.
• The very first recorded use of any variant of the word "fuck" (in this case a slightly ciphered "fvccant", mashing an English root with a Latin ending) was used in a poem called "Flen Flyys", denouncing a bunch of horny monks having sex with the women of the cathedral city of Ely in Cambridgeshire.
• In The Good Soldier Švejk Otto Katz is depicted as "the most perfect of army chaplains". An Austro-Hungarian World War I military chaplain who is given to drink (he's The Alcoholic of the novel where almost all characters are drinking heavily) and card games with other officers (though he's widely suspected of hiding aces up in the sleeve of his cassock by them), but he is less inclined to visiting brothels because he has some debts there. Instead he sends his orderly to fetch him a Street Walker from time to time. His sermons and religious services are often considered quite refreshing, as his alcoholic ramblings and drunken improvisations sometimes remade a Holy Mass into an entirely new kind of show. In general, he takes chaplaincy as "just a well-paid profession, where a fellow like me does not have to overwork himself" (he was actually raised Jewish - which apparently had not influenced him in any way, either), but he also states that he is quite tolerant to his more religiously-minded colleagues.
• Much of Archdeacon Frollo's villainy in The Hunchback of Notre Dame is driven by his lust for Esmerelda.
• Used several times in Judge Dee, and Played for Drama (as the books are written in the style of actual Chinese detective novels of the time, Taoism and Buddhism were viewed with suspicion by the Confucian elite).
  • The Judge's third wife was raped by a monk who saw her defenseless (before they married, it was mostly the doing of the judge's Top Wife to ensure the daughter of a criminal would not be condemned to a life of poverty).
  • A shrine renowned for allowing unfertile women to have children turns out to be run by monks who use a decidedly non-sanctioned method to conceive, counting on social stigma to keep the women from speaking out. The judge publicly says some of the pavilions did not have a secret entrance and therefore women impregnated at the shrine are not automatically guilty of adultery, through his official report gives the truth.
• In 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.
• Ambrosio, the eponymous monk of The Monk, who a) has sex with a demon disguised as a girl disguised as a monk, and b) rapes (and murders) his own sister.
• There's a variation in the New Jedi Order. Yuuzhan Vong science is more about religious doctrine and tradition than the scientific method, and master shapers - the highest-ranked scientists - are expected to live ascetic lives "above the carnal" dedicated to spirituality and knowledge. Master Shaper Kae Kwaad is a lecherous Cloud Cuckoo Lander who in between ranting incoherently and ordering nonsensical experiments spends most of his time hitting on his (young, female, attractive) apprentice Nen Yim in complete defiance of tradition, religion, and the expectations of his station. Turns out he's actually Onimi, the Supreme Overlord's jester, in disguise - in his real identity he's just as much of a pervert, but can get away with it because he's basically untouchable and doesn't have to worry about social graces anyway.
• Brother Hieronymus in No Good Deed... is a scheming friar who drinks ale by the barrel, can't pass up a brothel to save his life, shamelessly hits on and ogles his female companion, fights, gambles, and generally abuses his position for personal and financial gain or just to get himself out of trouble when it all blows up in his face. He also sanctimoniously calls said companion out on her own loose morals.
• The Goatmonk in The Philosophical Strangler is an utter vile sex pervert built along the lines of a bipedal hippopotamus, who makes the mistake of targeting the local Cloudcuckoolander swordswoman with his "affections", and suffers a Groin Attack which (ahem) cuts off his career of debauchery.
• Mentioned in Sharpe's Devil. Captain Ardiles describes how you can tell which is the best whorehouse in town: it's the one all the priests patronize. "And this one," he concludes, "is where the Bishop goes!"
• A Song of Ice and Fire gives us:
  • Thoros of Myr, technically a Red Priest of R'hllor. We say "technically" because, at the start of the series, he's more like the enthusiastic wine-woman-and-song tourney buddy of Robert Baratheon's entire circle of friends than an actual priest: a years-long Crisis of Faith (and the steadfast, quiet shelving of the orders you got regarding the conversion of the Seven Kingdoms) will do that. Unlike most Red Priests, Thoros just doesn't really go in for the Blood Magic, destroying demonic idols (aka those of other gods), or the whole burning-people-alive thing in any big way, even though he does occasionally pull genuine miracles out and does talk about his, eventual, renewed faith and the contradictions inherent in the human condition.
  • Septon Moon in the backstory detailed at The World of Ice & Fire was a Faith Militant leader that led an uprising against the Targaryen dynasty, but his credentials as a holy man were questionable: he claimed that the only book he ever read was the Seven-Pointed Star, but nobody ever saw him quote it or reading it himself despite being able to ramble speeches for hours on end. He had such an insatiable appetite for women that he bedded a different one every night. It was widely believed that his seed could turn barren women fertile and some would go as far as offering their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters to be blessed with good fortune, which he never declined. It got to a point his followers started using images of his penis as symbol of their crusade. To his credit, he never hid his vices from his followers and started every sermon admitting that "I am a sinner".

Live-Action TV

• Blackadder
  • Friar Bellows, one of the seven wickedest men in England, from The Black Adder. The first time we see him, he's being asked to look after a lady's chastity. The next time, he's about to relieve her of it.
  • The Baby-Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells in Blackadder II, who eats babies, is a colossal pervert that likes to play 'Nuns and Novices' with the prostitutes, and thinks nothing of doing an Ass Shove with a hot poker if one's debts to him aren't paid. And yet the Queen and his congregation have no idea, thinking his worst crime is a love of wine. Blackadder blackmails him into absolving his debt by putting him in a compromising position (with Percy as the prostitute), having it painted, and threatening to release the painting to the public. The Bishop asks if Blackadder's ever considered a career in the church.
  Bishop: No form of sexual depravity is too low for me. Animal, vegetable or mineral, I'll do anything to anything!
  Blackadder: Fine words for a Bishop. Yes, nice to hear the church speaking out for a change on social issues.
  • Subverted in "The Archbishop", where Edmund pretends to be one of these to get excommunicated and lose his position as the Archbishop of Canterbury, due to the fact holders of the position tend to be short-lived.
• In the Canal+ series Borgia most of the clergy depicted in the series are noted for their sexual appetites, especially Villain Protagonist Rodrigo Borgia, who was the Pope (Truth in Television) for most of the series. His eventual successor Giuliano della Rovere also had carried on a number of affairs with both men and women during his time in Rome.
• In the Showtime series The Borgias there are also clergy noted for their sexual appetites. This includes the Villain Protagonist Rodrigo Borgia himself, however it is a bit toned down compared to the Borgia in the Canal+ series or the real Borgia. ^note For example, Giulia Farnese was portrayed as being closer in age to Borgia in the Showtime series while in the Canal+ series she was portrayed as being in her late teens and early 20s during the series.
• The Commish. Commissioner Scali uncovers a high-class escort ring, only to be bombarded with calls from politicians and important local businessmen pressuring him to drop the case. He's relieved when told there's a priest on the line, only for the priest also to express 'concern' about the case. Scali responds pointedly, "I'm sorry, but it is a crime...not to mention a sin."
• Virtually every priest or nun in Father Ted, definitely including the protagonists. Father Ted is a gambling-addicted embezzler, Father Jack is a foul-mouthed, violent, alcoholic womanizer, and Father Dougal openly mocks the teachings of the church, though he may not mean to, as he is a Manchild who can be distracted by tossing candy across the room.
• In Episode 39 "Grandstand (or: The British Showbiz Awards)" of Monty Python's Flying Circus, there is the "Dirty Vicar sketch". Here, it involves a vicar who alternates without warning from a Quintessential British Gentleman and cockney-accented, lumbering brute that tackles two women, spouting "I like tits!" and "I'd like to get my fingers around those knockers" as he actively molests them.
• Tales of the Gold Monkey. Reverend Tenboom is far more interested in the native girls than in doing his duty as a priest or a German spy.
• Gonzalete in Pataclaun is all about this, spying on girls with cameras and covering his bedroom walls with sexy posters.
• Desmond on Lost became a monk after receiving a sign from God, but was kicked out for drinking the wine made at the monastery and it being clear that it wasn't where he belonged.

Music

• The Canadian song "Le curé de Terrebonne" has a young woman confess that she's loved men. The priest tells her a sin of that caliber can only be handled in Rome. She asks if she needs to bring her man along, the priest suggests another penance: kiss him five or six times and receive absolution. He does ask that she not go around telling people about it, as he already has enough work as it is.
• German medieval folk song 'Ein Mönch kam vor ein Nonnenkloster' ('A monk came to the nuns' cloister'). The title says it all. Its variant is also known as 'Es reist ein Pater' ('A Father once traveled').
• "The Old Monk", by the Merry Wives of Windsor.
• Traditional Sephardic song 'El Paipero' ('Brother Pedro') gives this trope truly epic proportions.

Mythology and Folklore

• 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 Obfuscating 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).
• Drukpa Kunley was a legendary Buddhist monk who introduced Buddhism to Bhutan. He was known by the nickname, the Saint of 5,000 Women and his penis was called the Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom. He apparently found casual sex to be the best way to convert the members of the opposite sex to his faith, and effigies of his penis are considered symbols of good luck and fertility to this day.

Theater

• The Trope Codifier is the title character of Molière's Tartuffe. The entire plot of the play revolves around Tartuffe's lechery and general hypocrisy. The lecherous cleric is a stock character appearing in many a French farce from the middle ages.
• Subverted in the Broadway musical Tenderloin. The Rev. Dr. Brock, whose ambition is to shut down New York City's Red Light District, becomes the city's laughingstock when Lt. Schmidt produces a photograph of him in bed with a naked prostitute. However, Tommy, whose camera was used to take the photograph, is able to prove that it is a composite.

Video Games

• Thoroughly Averted in 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 route.
  • He does relate one of his parishioners calling him this when he mentions the kendo team staying there (specifically why he needs so much food. He volunteered to make dinner for the team that night).
• Body Blows: Lo Ray is a Buddhist monk example. While he is a member of a Shaolin Buddhist monastery, but his goal in competing in the Body Blows tournament is to gain fame and fortune.
• While he's not an "old" monk, Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade gives us Saul - a priest who just can't help eyeing up every woman he sees and hitting on anything with two X chromosomes. However, he never actually dates anyone - mostly due to increasingly ridiculous hijinks - and never actually sleeps with anyone. Furthermore, he takes his duties as a priest and faith in God surprisingly seriously and has a number of intellectual conversations with the atheist Igrene. It's ultimately implied that his attempted womanising is at least partly Obfuscating Stupidity: as he's been sent by the 'verse's equivalent of the Pope to keep an eye on the war raging across the land and protect Roy and, thus, play the part of a fool to make sure that he can remain beneath suspicion.
• One sidequest in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has the Fateless One searching all of Amalur for an old monk's collection of ribald literature.
• In Rock Star Ate My Hamster, one of the irrelevant stories in The Stun is "VICAR MARRIES PORN STAR!"
• Eustache from Dead In Vinland isn't an old monk — he's maybe 30-ish — but he's certainly dirty, pursuing both the married Blodeuwedd and Blodeuwedd's teenage daughter Kari. He was actually a monk at one point, but more recently he's been a pirate.

Web Original

• In Noob, set in a part of the world where priests are supposed to be celibate, we first find out about Abraham's existence from the mouth of his son. Then we find out that he has another son, that he's actually a mafia don hiding from the police, that these two sons have different mothers and that he may have at least three more (hinted to have different mothers as well). Oh, and the son who spilled the beans? He's a silly Forgetful Jones and seems to have gotten it from Abraham.

Real Life

• As stated above, often Truth in Television during periods when the fate of The Un-Favourite or a younger son was often being forced into a career in the church.
• The first recorded instance of a Precision F-Strike being used in adjective form comes from a monk in 1528 who was making a copy of Cicero's De Officiis and scrawled "fuckin Abbott" in the margins.
• A British World War II Public Service Announcement film warned the public to be on the look out for Nazi paratroopers disguised as nuns. People were warned to look out for nuns with hairy forearms, adam's apples, and tattoos spelling out H.I.T.L.E.R.
• 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. These even extend not only to children but to the Swiss Guard, the men who are recruited for being "young, unmarried, and of high moral standards" to protect Vatican City.
• 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 committing sins of adultery, masturbation, rape or sodomy.
  • Stories and jokes about lustful monks and friars were about as popular in the Middle Ages as stories about greedy lawyers in modern America. While they shouldn't necessarily be taken as historical fact, some contemporary theological scholars like Erasmus of Rotherdham denounced these excesses in his writings so much so that he dismissed the scandal of Martin Luther's allowing Protestant clergy to marry as being no less hypocritical than the conduct of Catholic priests at the time.
  • In part, this was the result of younger sons of minor nobility going into the Church as a way to maintain an elevated social status despite their lack of inherited land and titles. Obviously, people who join the clergy for political convenience rather than religious conviction are less likely to follow the Church's moral rules.
• 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 noblewomen) 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 stricter enforcement of the rule that the clergy had to be celibate and could no longer own property.
  • In some areas of Europe, the local clergy just plain didn't bother with really implementing the celibacy rule for priests (the earlier ones, not the reinforcing with the Counter-Reformation). In practice, this seems to have lessened this trope — the priests apparently had less of a desire for multiple mistresses when they already were in committed long-term relationships with de-facto wives.^note The Bible actually requires church leaders to be married (1 Timothy ch. 3, for example), partly for this reason, but that's just one of the many parts of the Bible that Catholic tradition chooses to ignore. Papal envoys were unhappy, of course, but Rome was far away and your frilla was close... similarly, jokes notwithstanding, the Orthodox Church seems to have fewer issues with this kind of thing. Probably because they let priests who are already married live with their wives (they take an oath of chastity, but the word "chastity" is interpreted differently).
• During the reign of Henry VIII, the monasteries in England were first placed under very strict reformist rules, and then dissolved outright, and sexual immorality was one of the most common accusations used to bring them down. How much of this was true and how much was deliberate exploitation of the Dirty Old Monk trope by reformers/people who feared the monasteries bred plots against the King/people who thought the Crown just needed the money is somewhat unclear.
• A Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka was arrested in 2008 for running a brothel.
• Grigori Rasputin, known as the Mad Monk, was famous for his bisexual promiscuity. Although, as with most things about Rasputin, these tales need to be taken with a grain of salt. He did spend some time in an Orthodox monastery but was never formally ordained.
• The Sohei, Buddhist Warrior Monks in Japan were sometimes this trope. Despite supposedly seeking religious enlightenment, they were infamous for acting like gangs where they started fights with the local lords or other Warrior Monks from different temples. Due to some of their sect beliefs where they believe enlightenment can only be gained after they die rather than when they live, many of these monks rejected celibacy and enjoyed getting drunk, being with prostitutes, or having wives and children.
• Ironically, the Catholic Church didn't formally mandate celibacy for priests until 1095, and it was a scheme to raise funds for the Church; Pope Urban II used it to introduce the callagium, which was in effect a tax on priests based on how many mistresses they had. It backfired - homosexual activity skyrocketed in the Church as a direct result because priests didn't have to pay for any male lovers.
• Pope Damasus I (366-84) was known as "the matron's ear-tickler" for his reputed skill with the ladies.
• Pope John XII (955-63) was a Depraved Bisexual who had dozens of lovers of both sexes, including one of his father's former concubines. He turned the Lateran Papal Palace into a brothel, was once accused of summoning the Devil during an orgy, and would get together with friends to molest female pilgrims at the basilica of St. Peter — when a cardinal pointed out this wasn't theologically sound practice, Pope John XII had him castrated. He was found guilty of incest, adultery and murder by a trial held in absentia, and was ultimately bludgeoned to death in the bed of a man he was cuckolding when the angry husband came home and caught the pope with his wife.
• Pope Sergius III (904-11) routinely had sex with underage girls, including fathering the future Pope John XI on a 15-year-old mistress named Marozia when he was 45.
• In the mid-to-late 1100s, a monk named Clernbald was considered for the position of Archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Alexander III (1159-81), but rejected; the pope wanted a celibate man for the role, and Clernbald was the father of 17 illegitimate children in one village alone.
  • In the same time period, the Bishop of Lincoln would "test" the moral health of England's nunneries by visiting them and fondling the breasts of the nuns to observe their reactions.
• Pope Anacletus (1130-38) kept a prostitue for a mistress, committed incest with his sister (and several other female relatives), and was known for raping nuns.
• Pope Clement VI (1342-52) kept dozens of mistresses, and when told by his confessor that he had to give them up, claimed they were essential for his medical health, as he had begun the habit of seeing prostitutes as a young man and his doctors advised him to continue it.
• Pope Pius II (1558-64) was a well-known author of erotic literature who fathered a dozen illegitimate children.
• Pope Sixtus IV (1471-84), who built the Sistene Chapel and unleashed the Spanish Inquisition, fathered six illegitimate sons, one of them upon his sister.
• Pope Julius II (1503-13), who commissioned the Sistene Chapel's famous painted interior roof from Michelangelo, was a paedophile who spent much of his time having sex with rent boys and male prostitutes.
• Pope Leo X (1513-21), a patron to both Michelangelo and Raphael, was a homosexual notorious for his promiscuity, to the point that on the day he was elected pope, he had to be carried into the conclave on a stretcher due to the ulceration of his anus.
• Pope Julius III (1550-55) was a bisexual paedophile with a preference for young boys, with his exploits including promoting several of his young lovers to the rank of cardinal and keeping his own illegitimate son Bertuccino as a concubine. His behavior inspired Cardinal della Casa's infamous poem "In Praise of Sodomy".
• Having been defrocked by the Vatican in late 2022 for placing an aborted fetus on an altar during one of his live sermons, controversial priest Frank Pavone found himself in further trouble after several women accused him of sexual assault and unwanted groping during his tenure as director of the anti-abortion group Priests for Life.

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