According to reports, a gay dating website for “homosensible Roman Catholic priests”, has been operating out of the Vatican.

Despite not being explicitly pornographic, reports from EponymousFlower suggest that the site, named Venerabilis, is geared towards enabling sexual contact between priests.

The site contains chatrooms in five languages, where sexual encounters in process have been discovered, with face-to-face meetings arranged in a number of locations.

The site is run “by a fraternity of Homo-Sensitive Roman Catholic Priests” for those seeking to find “like-minded priests” using chatrooms and “missed connections” posts.

When signing up to the site, new members are allocated an automatically-generated user ID, but a Catholic writer from Dallas, in the US, has said the site is full of personal email addresses.

“This site is smart in that everyone operates under automatically generated IDs, but people are dumb and have left their personal e-mails all over the place. I bet a decent multi-lingual private investigator could identify dozens of people from the site in an afternoon’s work.”

The site also includes live Twitter feeds for issues such as when the Pope recently sparked controversy with a remark about a “gay lobby” within the Vatican, for which the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious was forced to issue a formal apology.