Sir, - I refer to a remarkably churlish letter from the Rev Peter O'Callaghan (August 13th) in which he castigates Jim Duffy for his article on John Boswell's historical investigation of gay marriage. Fr John Harvey is ingenuously invoked and quoted as saying that Dr Boswell's writings have powerfully influenced the lifestyle of homosexual advocates. May I say that although I read the book with interest and admiration for its exhaustive, and indeed sometimes exhausting, scholarship, it has had no discernible impact on my lifestyle at all and I am at a loss to know how it could.
The Rev O'Callaghan goes on to quote a series of reviews rehashed at two removes intended to discredit Boswell. The first person invoked is a Mr Brent Shaw who "teaches history" at a college in the Arctic wastes of north-western Canada, and the quotation consists of a rather confused semantic exchange which doesn't seem to impinge on Boswell's argument at all. The next person into the lists is somebody called Robin Darling Young, although we are not told whether or not he teaches anything at all. Mr Young thinks it implausible that such services could have been conducted within a Church which shared certain attitudes with early Byzantine law codes which were clearly anti-gay.
It is evident that Mr Young is not a historian or he would not be surprised by these kind of contradictions, examples of which could be multiplied. Constantine, for example, the first Christian emperor, regarded himself as a model of Christianity and took a very dim view of those who broke the Ten Commandments. Nevertheless, he permitted himself sufficient licence to commit murders on a pretty wide scale, including those of his mother and brother.
The last person brought into the argument (not in defence of anything that I can discern but rather simply against Mr Duffy) is David Wright, senior lecturer in church history at the University of Edinburgh. Mr Wright pays tribute to Boswell's extraordinary skills and industry but doesn't agree with the conclusions which he finds tendentious and suggests that the verdict should be "not proven".
This barrage from persons of relative academic obscurity will not do Boswell's international reputation a great deal of damage, however much it may satisfy the spitefulness of the Rev O'Callaghan. Indeed, my advice to the Rev O'Callaghan would be that he should put his intellectual peashooter away as he is more likely to damage himself than his target.
I am, moreover, at a loss to understand the relevance of a quotation from a novel by Edmund White introduced by Fr O'Callaghan towards the end of his epistle, unless it is to demonstrate with quite engaging modesty that the reverend father cannot distinguish fact from fiction - which is a serious disadvantage if you pose as a historian or even as a critic of historians.
Finally, I am delighted to learn that the Vatican has produced a volume on Christian anthropology and homosexuality. If Fr O'Callaghan would be kind enought to forward a copy of this obscure work I should be happy to review it for your newspaper. - Yours, etc., Senator David Norris,
Senad Eireann,
Baile Atha Cliath 2.