Scholar Uncovers Church's Past Blessing of Gay Relationships Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Thursday August 09 05:29 PM EDT (via yahoo) Catholic scholar uncovers church's gay past By Peter Moore, 365Gay.com [SUMMARY: A world-renowned Roman Catholic scholar says he has found evidence that the Catholic church sanctioned and blessed same-sex relationships from the Middle Ages to the 19th century.] LONDON -- A world-renowned Roman Catholic scholar says he has found evidence that the Catholic church sanctioned and blessed same-sex relationships from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. Alan Bray, an ecclesiastical historian and research fellow at Birkbeck College, London, says the proof was staring church leaders in their faces all along. "It's in the churches themselves," Bray said. "All you have to do is look at memorials dating from the 14th to the 19th centuries." Bray said the evidence is on tomb markers commemorating passionate friendships. Often the partners were buried together. Although there is no indication that all those commemorated in memorials were involved in sexual relationships, it is clear that some were and that the churches turned a blind eye, according to Bray. Some of the memorials are striking in their intimacy. In Merton College chapel in Oxford, a brass dating from the 14th century records the burial together of John Bloxham and John Whytton, showing the two figures standing side by side holding hands in prayer. Another, dating from 1684 in Christ's College chapel, Cambridge, celebrates the "connubium" or marriage of John Finch and Thomas Baines, illustrated by a knotted cloth. In Gonville and Caius college chapel a memorial of 1619 shows Thomas Legge and John Gostlin with a heart in flames uplifted by two hands with a Latin inscription which translates as: "Love joined them living. So may the earth join them in their burial. O Legge, Gostlin's heart you have still with you." Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, both knights, were buried in the same tomb after dying at Constantinople in 1391.They have a monument depicting their heraldic shields impaled as if they were married, and their helmets in a stylized kiss. Then there was the 17th century bishop of Hereford, Herbert Croft, and the cathedral dean, George Benson. They were buried together within the communion rails of the cathedral with the inscription: "In life united. In death not divided." The chapel of St John the Baptist in Westminster Abbey has the tomb of Mary Kendall dating from 1710 with an inscription recording: "That close Union and Friendship, In which she lived, with the Lady Catharine Jones; And in testimony of which she desir'd That even their Ashes, after Death, Might not be divided." The recently discovered diary of Anne Lister, mistress of Shibden Hall, Yorkshire -- who had a lesbian relationship with Ann Walker -- describes how they had their "marriage" solemnized at Holy Trinity church in Goodramgate, York, in 1834. Even Cardinal John Henry Newman, one of English Catholicism's most revered figures from the 19th century, insisted that he be buried with his closest friend. Newman wrote after the death of Ambrose St John in 1875: "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine." The Vatican has not commented on Bray's findings. For more gay news from Canada, the United States and the world, visit 365Gay.com. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytsxp-08.12.01-01:23:36-24721