Sir, - Fr Michael Manning (August 17th) is right in saying that another translator interpreted Gerald of Wales's description of a 12th-century Irish religious ceremony involving two men differently from Professor Boswell. The evidence is, however, that Thomas Wright's 1881 translation is seriously misleading. It was produced in an era of high Victorian prejudice against foreigners (the Irish, black Africans), against particular religions (notably Roman Catholicism), and against homosexuality (that very decade saw homosexual relations criminalised). As a result, both subconsciously and deliberately, Victorian translators frequently played down meanings in documents they saw as subversive or immoral.
The ceremony Gerald witnessed was partly Christian, partly pagan (like many aspects of Irish Christianity; Croagh Patrick and most saints' wells are pagan sites Christianised by the Irish Church). The Christian part of the ceremony Gerald describes contained key features of marital unions, as Gerald acknowledged, using the medieval Latin word "desponsare", meaning marriage or betrothal, to describe what he saw. Nor would it be surprising for homosexuality to be openly accepted in a communal ceremony in the Ireland of the period. am-chairdes, literally "manual love" - exist.) Homosexuality was treated merely as one of many grounds for divorce under the Brehon laws, in no sense the "unmentionable act" of Wright's era.
Gerald's own words describing what he saw and the contemporary culture within which the ceremony took place suggest that, on balance of probabilities, Boswell's late 1980s translation, not Wright's 1881, version is correct. As I have said before, neutral objective observers agree that Boswell has provided well researched, solidly proven, academic standard evidence that priest-blessed "same-sex unions" existed from Ireland to Istanbul and in between from the 700s to the 1700s.
Nowhere in my article did I suggest the church should solemnise same-sex unions. I merely pointed out the historical fact that in the past that had been done. To argue historically that Christian tradition had always universally been opposed to recognition of same sex unions is on the archival evidence, to use Archbishop Connell's word, a sham, probably based on historical ignorance. Nor was it suggested that the blessing of such unions was commonplace. But to suggest that the ceremonies that took place were "fringe" is equally misleading, given that such ceremonies (a) are recorded in all the key Western and Eastern church archives; (b) occurred geographically throughout Christendom; (c) occurred continually over at least 1,000-year period, probably longer; and (d) are clearly listed in widely used ancient books of "rites" alongside the standard heterosexual union ceremonies. - Yours, etc., Jim Duffy,
Crumlin,
Dublin 12.