Sir, - Historian and writer Jim Duffy has further revealed (August 15th) that he was "won over by the astonishingly detailed evidence" in John Boswell's The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe to the belief that the early Church blessed homosexual unions. Mr Duffy is not alone.
Professor Boswell himself found this to be true of others who had researched this area before him: "In addition to German scholars emboldened by their country's incipient homosexual rights movement in the late 19th century, only female and gay anthropologists, writers and historians of nearly any time and place have been able to view the ceremony [of same-sex union] objectively and without noticeable reticence." (p. 276)
Revealingly, nowhere does John Boswell give a place in his stable of believers to the German scholar, philosopher and theologian Joseph Ratzinger, an expert on "affairs" of the Catholic Church (both early and late) and author of the 1986 Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons which is still available from the Catholic Truth Society. - Yours, etc., (Rev) Peter O'Callaghan,
Inch, Killeagh,
Co Cork.