Sir, - Jim Duffy (Rite and Reason, August 11th) says that "for the Church to ignore the evidence in its own archives would be a cowardly cop-out" on the issue of Christian homosexual marriage.
After John Boswell's book, The Marriage of Likeness: Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, was first published (New York: Villard Books, 1994), a Fr John F. Harvey devoted 10 pages in his book The Truth About Homosexuality (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996) to a discussion of the historical research undertaken by Boswell.
At that time Fr Harvey said: "Since Boswell has influenced the lifestyle of homosexual advocates so powerfully, it is necessary to give serious attention to this book. Like his previous book on homosexuality (Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), the present work is erudite, and, as one reads it, one is aware that his points are plentifully footnoted in Greek, Latin, and many other languages." No doubt Jim Duffy's knowledge of these languages supports his allegation of a "cop-out" by the Church after reading Boswell's book(s).
However, Fr Harvey quotes the following from scholarly reviews of Boswell's The Marriage of Likeness:
1. Brent D. Shaw, who teaches history at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada: "Boswell's argument stands or falls on his interpretation of a series of documents relating to a singular ritual practised in the Christian church during antiquity and the high middle ages, principally in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. The bonds that are confirmed in these church rituals are cautiously (and a little coyly) labelled by him as "same-sex unions". For his arguments to have the force that he wishes them to have, however, the words "same-sex" and "union" must be construed to mean "male homosexual" and "marriage". If they signify other sorts of associations that happened to be same sex in gender, or unions that were meant for purposes other than marriage, or a permanent affective union, then his claims fail."
2. Robin Darling Young: ". . . neither Boswell's reconstruction of them nor his method of argumentation can possibly support the interpretation that he proposes: first, it is highly implausible that homosexual unions either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages would have been blessed by a religion that promoted ascetic devotion to the kingdom of God rather than that condition which contemporary Americans understand as the healthy expression of erotic drives . . .Furthermore, early Byzantine law codes contain extremely harsh punishments for homosexual intercourse."
3. David Wright, senior lecturer in church history at the University of Edinburgh: "Yet, as in the earlier book, Mr Boswell's extraordinary skills and industry are deployed with such tendentiousness, exaggeration, special pleading . . .that the work deserves, at very best, the distinctive verdict of the Scottish courts: not proven".
Historian Jim Duffy doesn't identify which "Church" is engaged in a "cowardly cop-out" (to quote his own academic language) on the debate on homosexual unions. To show that this is certainly not true of the Catholic Church I would refer your interested readers not only to the above but also to Christian Anthropology and Homosexuality (Rome: Vatican City, 1997), a collection of papers on homosexuality (originally published as a series of articles written for L'Osservatore Romano) by scholars in their respective areas of interest, and no less eminent than the late John Boswell. At least three of the papers in this collection deal with the subject of same-sex unions.
The homosexual author Edmund White, in his recent autobiographical novel The Farewell Symphony, informs us as early as page 10 that: "I'd had sex with my first thousand men but that was a statistic that might sound like an achievement more to someone else than to me. Sex is an appetite that must be fed every day; even a thousand past banquets cannot nourish the body tomorrow. I was longing for the thousand and first knight whom at last I would marry and with whom I'd live ever after in the strictest fidelity. If marriage was my conscious but still deferred goal, I was less ready to admit I was always on the look out for adventure." Which "union" should be blessed in this Duffy's Circus and by what "Church" worthy of its name?
If Jim Duffy had amassed his own "archive" on homosexuality and related issues he wouldn't be coming now, late in the day, to the debate on same-sex unions like a crowing cock perched precariously on the rim of the new millennium. Everyone has been up and at it since much earlier, including the much more likeable Andrew Sullivan in his book Virtually Normal (1995). - Yours, etc., Rev Peter O'Callaghan,
Inch,
Killeagh,
Co Cork.