Sir, - I am still trying to control my mirth at Rev Peter O'Callaghan's letter (August 13th) about my article on same-sex unions (Rite and Reason, August 11th). What is it about priests and The Irish Times? We had Fr O'Hanlon's ill-informed diatribe about Mary Robinson's dress when she met His Holiness. Now it is Fr O'Callaghan letter with his comic, over-the-top language ("Duffy's Circus . . . crowing cock . . . "), high on rant but almost empty on content relevant to the simple issue: did the early church (the eastern Orthodox and western Catholic) bless homosexual unions?
Historians look at the evidence and then say what they find, putting it in a relevant context. We don't say "that could not have happened" and so disregard the evidence, as appears to be Fr O'Callaghan's approach and that of some of the supposed experts he refers to. (A Fr Harvey, whom he quotes, incredibly seems to think that Boswell's mere writing about same-sex unions influences homosexual lifestyles.)
The evidence of some sort of Christian same-sex union ceremonies is astonishingly clear-cut: for example, according to JeanBaptiste Molin, who studied medieval heterosexual marriage, up to 10 symbols were present at heterosexual marriage ceremonies, though frequently only five or six were used. Same-sex unions used four of the 10 marriage symbols: the joining of right hands during the ceremony over the gospel on the altar, the placing of a veil or a crown over the spouses, the bestowing of a wedding kiss at the altar and the giving of a wedding banquet (the wedding banquet of the Byzantine Emperor Basil I and his partner John was hosted by John's mother, Danelis). That fact, plus the liturgical structure of the ceremonies and the ceremony's position among heterosexual union ceremonies in prayerbooks, leaves little doubt that the ceremonies were marital, involving two people of the same sex, two males or two females. Gerald of Wales described the ceremony he saw in Ireland as "a novel/unusual form of marriage", something he found disgusting but which he nevertheless saw as a form of marriage. Furthermore, Eastern monks who weren't allowed to marry were explicitly banned from taking part in heterosexual and same sex-unions, again implying they were parallel marital ceremonies. When first told of Prof Boswell's claims I was totally dismissive. However, I was won over by the astonishingly detailed evidence.
Academics making claims merely to push an agenda can all too easily be selective in the documents they use, forcing critics to go back through ancient texts and check the sources for themselves. Boswell, however didn't simply give a detailed line-by-line translation in English. He quoted in the appendix entire documents in Greek, giving opponents an easy opportunity to spot any mis-translations. His documents came from the Vatican, Sinai, Grottaferrata, St Petersburg, Patmos, Istanbul, Belgrade, Mount Athos, Paris, Athens University and Jerusalem, with the folios from which the documents came all listed covering a period from the eighth to the 19th centuries, as well as a long list of other back-up texts. I have yet to see any evidence, as opposed to ignorance, as well sourced, rebutting Boswell's detailed claims. - Yours, etc., Jim Duffy,
Crumlin,
Dublin 12.