Never shy of controversy, Peter Tatchell, the gay rights activist, has taken on the Roman Catholic Church for “moral vandalism” and “religious desecration”. It seems rather an extreme way to describe the Vatican's decision to exhume the body of Cardinal Newman from a small graveyard near Rednal to transfer it to the Birmingham Oratory in the city centre.

If resuscitated before the Day of Judgment, Newman would hate contemporary Birmingham, but the point of the exercise is religious. He may soon be canonised, and there will be many more visitors or pilgrims to his grave if he is made a saint and the translation of his remains (that's the technical term) to Birmingham will make access easier.

However, the removal of his body means that his corpse will leave behind that of Ambrose St John, the friend with whom he chose to be buried. This is what has got Mr Tatchell going. To quote him at length: “Newman repeatedly made it clear that he wanted to be buried next to his lifelong partner... No one gave the Pope permission to defy Newman's wishes. The reburial has only one aim in mind - to cover up Newman's homosexuality and to disavow his love for another man. It is an act of shameless dishonesty and personal betrayal by the gay-hating Catholic Church.”

It's hard to know where to start with the anachronisms in that statement, the sense of a brutish 21st-century mentality being violently thrust upon a 19th-century individual of a very different cast of mind, the posthumous rape of a particularly delicate sensibility by a particularly coarse one.

For starters, Newman knew exactly what a translation meant - it is part of the formal recognition by the Church that someone is a saint in Heaven with God. Mr Tatchell may not buy the idea, but Newman did. The translation of a saint's body is a formal, solemn affair, with its own ancient liturgy. In other words, it's an ineffable privilege and the cardinal would have been acutely alive to that, although obviously not in relation to himself. The idea of Newman, whose conversion to Rome was the pre-eminent religious scandal of 19th-century England, getting on his high horse in spirit at the presumption of the Pope's separating him from his boyfriend in death is simply risible.

Obviously the term “partner” he wouldn't have understood at all - but then the words “gay” and indeed “homosexual” didn't mean anything at the time. Homosexual acts were familiar to even the most sheltered soul in Oxford and Newman would have rejected the suggestion that he engaged in them with revulsion.

He set particular store by chastity and celibacy - “a high state of life” - which was the means by which many intense male friendships in his circle seem to have been transmuted into something more rarefied. Mr Tatchell says breezily that “it is conceivable that both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sex. Abstinence does not alter orientation”. But for Newman, the difference between emotional intimacy and sex with another man would have been absolute.

Mr Tatchell is only the latest to say that Newman was gay. In the celebrated controversy with Charles Kingsley that infuriated Newman into writing his spiritual autobiography, the author of The Water Babies said that Newman considered “cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to his saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage”.

You could interpret that in a strictly scriptural sense; I think it's pretty barbed. A gay relationship was more directly insinuated by Geoffrey Faber (who didn't think much of StJohn) in his 1934 book on the Tractarians, The Oxford Apostles. He referred to Newman's outrage when someone proposed an address to him assuring him of “gratitude, veneration and love”. Newman said: “Such words I really could not bear. I am not used to them. I have never heard them.” Faber remarked: “No doubt he could not have borne the words even from St John, but he lived on the reality.”

Oo-er, missus.

As it happens, although I'm a devoted admirer of Newman - he is a master of English prose - I don't particularly relish his canonisation. Plainly his behaviour and language were often that of an old queen. Equally obviously, he was devoted to St John and goes to the trouble of declaring as much in his Apologia.

But outing historical figures as gay, unless there is pretty clear evidence, strikes me as an outrageous liberty. It's the equivalent of those Mormons who go through their family trees, retrospectively christening their ancestors. Homosexuality has been posthumously assigned to many, from Benjamin Disraeli (camp dandy, most recently in The Politics of Pleasure, by William Kuhn) to Abraham Lincoln (shared a bed with a man for two years and had a mad wife, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C.A. Tripp). But it's another matter when the man in question would have regarded gay sex as an abomination.

Poor Newman had his faults but he doesn't deserve to be championed by Peter Tatchell.

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