Any validity to early Catholic/christian same sex marriage ceremonies?

[Tristan]

This popped up on my facebook feed, it’s an argument put forth by, apparently, an anthropologist.

He claims that there is a ton of documented evidence and other information indicating that the early Church used to not only condone same-sex marriages, but had rites and rituals having to do with the ceremony.

http://anthropologist.livejournal.com/1314574.html This is the link.

Some clipped text:

“These church rites had all the symbols of a heterosexual marriage: the whole community gathered in a church, a blessing of the couple before the altar was conducted with their right hands joined, holy vows were exchanged, a priest officiatied in the taking of the Eucharist and a wedding feast for the guests was celebrated afterwards. These elements all appear in contemporary illustrations of the holy union of the Byzantine Warrior-Emperor, Basil the First (867-886 CE) and his companion John.”

again:

"Same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe list in great detail some same gender ceremonies found in ancient church liturgical documents. One Greek 13th century rite, “Order for Solemn Same-Sex Union”, invoked St. Serge and St. Bacchus, and called on God to “vouchsafe unto these, Thy servants [N and N], the grace to love one another and to abide without hate and not be the cause of scandal all the days of their lives, with the help of the Holy Mother of God, and all Thy saints”. The ceremony concludes: “And they shall kiss the Holy Gospel and each other, and it shall be concluded”.

Another 14th century Serbian Slavonic “Office of the Same Sex Union”, uniting two men or two women, had the couple lay their right hands on the Gospel while having a crucifix placed in their left hands. After kissing the Gospel, the couple were then required to kiss each other, after which the priest, having raised up the Eucharist, would give them both communion."

Any validity to these claims, and if so, how should they alter the stand taken by the faithful today?

Placed in GD, as a pre-emptive measure…

[Kimstu]

Debatable; it all hinges on what you mean by “same-sex marriage”. The scholar you’re talking about is John Boswell, whose work is thoughtfully reviewed by Richard Cooper:

[…] Briefly stated, Boswell’s argument is that for a period of over a thousand years (roughly between A.D. 500 and 1500), the Catholic and Orthodox churches of Europe sanctioned a ceremony that permitted the life-long union of same-sex couples. There is nothing startlingly new about this assertion. For years, liturgiologists and anthropologists have been aware of these ceremonies. The text of the ceremony was first published in printed form in Western Europe by Jacques Goar in the seventeenth century. In an article in the famous Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen in 1908, P. Näcke drew attention to these rites in Albania. Näcke’s contribution, which has subsequently passed into the annals of gay lore, is that he explicitly associated the practice with “Homosexualität.” These ceremonies appear to have been fairly common in the Balkans well into modern times. Their existence is not seriously in question. What is problematic is how one interprets them.

In Greek and Old Church Slavonic, the ceremony of what Boswell calls “same-sex union” is identified by a difficult term that translates literally as “the making of brothers” (adelphopoiesis, bratotvorenie). Scholars familiar with the rite and the manuscripts containing it have generally believed that it was a form of collateral adoption. Much of Boswell’s historical exposition is an attempt to demonstrate that this interpretation does not hold up. Interestingly, though debatably, he shows the ways in which the words for “brother” (adelphos, frater, brat) could mean homosexual companion. What creates a problem here is the difference in context in which the word could be used.

Probably no one doubts that during the Middle Ages, as before and after, many people of the same sex formed more or less permanent unions based on physical desire. What is crucial is the way in which these people understood themselves and what they did, and it is just this that is so difficult to recover. As Boswell amply showed, though perhaps somewhat inadvertently, in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, the surviving textual evidence, which is basically the only access we have to these past lives, indicates a largely secular and classicizing context in which same-sex relations were depicted and discussed. Aside from that, there is the ideal of friendship, as in St. Aelred of Rievaulx, which may owe as much to Cicero as to Christ. All of this is simply to say that there was a particular language and certain conventions of decorum. The question then becomes that of the extent to which these linguistic and social forms shaped self-understanding and behaviour (except that these two latter terms may even be too modern). But in that case we are either thrown back into the realist-nominalist (essentialist-constructionist) controversy or, escaping that somewhat unproductive impasse, forced to re-examine the ways in which our modern understanding of religion may be just as context relative as we may postulate the mediæval understanding of sexuality was. (Does one again hear rumblings from the Vatican?)

The trend of this analysis, then, is that Boswell may very well be right. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that in the Christian Middle Ages - at least in certain areas (and that is important) - two men could have been united together in a permanent relationship by a priest in a church, just like people of the opposite sex. (There is a minimal amount of evidence for the use of the same or a similar ceremony for women. This is a matter that needs further investigation, perhaps in relation to laywomen associated with convents of nuns.) What this does not mean is that these two men would have united themselves for anything like the same reasons that twentieth-century gay couples would - or, more importantly, from a similar articulation of those reasons. […]

Short answer: There certainly were medieval Christian rites that recognized some form of voluntary kinship or union between two members of the same sex (usually or maybe exclusively men). And I don’t think anyone doubts that some medieval Christians were sexually attracted to and/or sexually active with members of their own sex.

But it is by no means proven that these rites constituted any form of official or even covert recognition of a same-sex union with erotic or marital aspects resembling those of opposite-sex marriage. Sometimes a bond of brotherhood is just a bond of brotherhood.

[HeathnFarmer]

@Kimstu

Sometimes a bond of brotherhood is just a bond of brotherhood.

and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But the rest of the time… well, you get the idea. It seems unlikely that anyone adhering to the modern doctrines, or at least paying them lip service, is not going to find any homosex going on in those 1000 years. Ya, and the AIDs among the clergy is from needle sharing.

[Kimstu]

@HeathnFarmer

It seems unlikely that anyone adhering to the modern doctrines, or at least paying them lip service, is not going to find any homosex going on in those 1000 years.

Of course there was homosex going on among medieval Catholics and Eastern Christians, as I specifically acknowledged in my post.

What remains unproven, although lots of sources (like the OP’s link) seem willing to take it on faith, is the allegation that the ritual of adelphopoiesis performed in those churches was deliberately used to recognize or consecrate a particular type of relationship that included homosex.

Were some medieval adelphopoiesis partners getting jiggy with each other? Undoubtedly, just as there undoubtedly were instances in medieval times of male business partners or schoolmates or brothers-in-law or guild brethren getting jiggy with each other.

Was the rite of adelphopoiesis officially or generally viewed as a sort of “marriage equivalent” that conferred official sanction on a male-male relationship that involved getting jiggy with each other? Unproven, unsubstantiated by direct evidence, and arguably rather unlikely. That at least seems to be the consensus view among anthropologists.

[BrainGlutton]

@HeathnFarmer

Ya, and the AIDs among the clergy is from needle sharing.

What AIDS among the clergy?

[Kimstu]

@BrainGlutton

What AIDS among the clergy?

Where you been? The Kansas City Star did a whole series on HIV in the Catholic priesthood back in 2000.

[BrainGlutton]

@Kimstu

Where you been? The Kansas City Star did a whole series on HIV in the Catholic priesthood back in 2000.

Hmm . . . Y’know, ISTM that if you grow up Catholic and you find that your orientation is same-sex . . . the clergy might look like an attractive career – in fact, it might be the only way to get everybody off your back about getting married. Catholic families are famously just horrible about that.

[Kimstu]

@BrainGlutton

Hmm . . . Y’know, ISTM that if you grow up Catholic and you find that your orientation is same-sex . . . the clergy might look like an attractive career

Even if you don’t really know what “same-sex orientation” is, as was the case for many seminarians back in more sheltered times, if you were an earnest/devout type you might easily think “Hey, I don’t really want to get with girls the way the other guys do and I’m not all that enthusiastic about getting married, it must be that God is calling me to the priesthood.” A lot of priests only figured out the whole homosexuality thing after ordination.