Vatican vows to continue fighting for traditional marriage despite setbacks
ROME, November 12, 2012 – In an unusually strongly worded statement on Vatican Radio’s website, Fr. Federico Lombardi, the head of the Vatican’s press office, has vowed that the Church “will not give up its defence of marriage” despite recent setbacks.
Lombardi’s comments followed a front-page editorial in the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which appeared the same day and decried the growth of “politically correct ideologies invading every culture of the world,” backed by organizations like the UN. The paper called for “courage” from Catholics in fighting those ideologies.
The Church, said the editorial, “is the only institution to point out that while it is certainly unfair to persecute homosexuals, to oppose the marriage between persons of the same sex is not an offensive act, but a point of view that must be respected.”
“And so is opposition to abortion,” it added. “This is not an attack on human rights, but the defense of a social structure - the heterosexual family - which formed the basis, so far, of all human societies.”
In a statement published in 30 different languages, Lombardi agreed, writing that the Church’s opposition to same-sex “marriage” is not a matter of unjust discrimination, which the Church does not allow. Rather it is “a question of admitting that a husband and a wife are publicly recognised as such; and that children who come into the world can know, and say they have, a father and a mother.”
Lombardi was responding to the fact that voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington State on Tuesday voted to legalize same-sex “marriage.” Lombardi called the votes “myopic” and said that “the logic of it cannot have a far-sighted outlook for the common good.”
He also noted the hardening of the legal situation in Spain, where the Constitutional Court recently refused an appeal challenging the country’s same-sex “marriage” law, and the fact that a bill has been introduced in France to legalize same-sex “marriage.”
The erosion of natural marriage in the laws of Western countries, Lombardi said, “does not cease to amaze.”
There is “public acknowledgement” that “monogamous marriage between a man and woman is an achievement of civilization,” he said.
Catholics who oppose the re-writing of marriage laws maintain that disconnecting marriage from procreation is a way of draining all genuine meaning from the institution. Unhooked from its procreative purpose, they say, marriage could come to mean any pairing or even grouping of consenting people.
Lombardi took up this theme, saying, “If not, why not contemplate also freely chosen polygamy and, of course, not to discriminate, polyandry?”
Defending natural marriage, Lombardi said, is a matter of “preserving a vision of the human person and of human relationships where there is a public acknowledgement of monogamous marriage between a man and woman is an achievement of civilization.”
The Catholic Church, he said, will not “give up proposing that society recognise a specific place for marriage between a man and a woman”.
In the editorial in L’Osservatore Romano, journalist Lucetta Scaraffia wrote, “The church is called to present itself as the lone critic of modernity, the only check ... to the breakup of the anthropological structures on which human society was founded.”
“It seems in fact that the Church, at least on this floor, is doomed to failure,” Scaraffia wrote, but this appearance is deceptive. “Contrary opinions, even by journalists and intellectuals close to the Church,” are finding their way into the public debate, she said, a result of Catholics raising their objections after reflection on the topic and honing their reasons in public forums.
“Catholics are playing a key role in today’s guardians of freedom of religion and belief,” Scaraffia wrote.
She cited the case of the Catholic adoption agencies in the UK, some of which fought lengthy legal battles for the right to refuse to consider gay partners as adoptive parents. Their struggle, Scaraffia wrote, “has made it clear to everyone that this is not progress, but rather a conflict that sees the defeat in these cases of one of the freedoms constitutive of the modern state, the religious freedom.”
Scaraffia noted the irony of the US forcing Catholic institutions to violate their religious principles and provide contraceptives for employees: “To restrict religious freedom in a country founded by colonists who had fled there in order to freely practice their faith is really a dangerous contradiction.”
Catholics, she said, are the only group to “have the courage and the strength to oppose an ideology based on political correctness, that is invading every culture in the world, thanks to the support it gets from the United Nations.”
The pair of editorials are a departure for the Vatican’s media machinery that that has heretofore been largely supportive of Obama and dismissive of his many Catholic critics. L’Osservatore Roman’s editor-in-chief, Gian Maria Vian, has penned several editorials defending and praising Obama and his administration, including one in 2009 in which he said that far from being a pro-abortion president, Obama – who is on record as voting against a bill the would have protected infants born alive after failed abortions – can only really be called “pro-choice”.
The definition of natural marriage has already been abolished in eleven countries since 2000: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, and Sweden. Same-sex “marriage” has also now been installed in parts of Mexico and at the state level in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont and the District of Columbia.
The states of Maryland, Maine and Washington approved the creation of “same-sex marriage” at last week’s election. The topic is open to legislative debate in a dozen other Western countries.
In addition, civil unions, also called civil partnerships, domestic partnerships or registered partnerships, have been created in law in many jurisdictions and grant all or most of the privileges of legal marriage, including in some cases the right to adopt children. They are recognised in Andorra, Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Uruguay. Same-sex civil partnerships are recognised in Mexico in Coahuila and Mexico City and the United States in California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.
