Spanish prosecutor to investigate Cardinal-elect for calling homosexuality ‘defective’
MADRID, Spain, February 7, 2014 A Spanish prosecutor has agreed to investigate Cardinal-elect Fernando Sebastian Aguilar after a national homosexualist group launched a legal action against him last month, accusing him of hate speech for calling homosexuality a “defective way of expressing sexuality.”
Aguilar, recently named as a cardinal-elect by Pope Francis, told the Spanish newspaper Diario SurJanuary 20 that sex “has a structure and a purpose, which is procreation.”
Cardinal-elect Fernando Sebastián Aguilar with Pope Francis
“A homosexual who can’t achieve procreation is failing,” he said. “Our bodies have many defects. I have high blood pressure, a defect I have to try and correct in whatever way I can.”
Members of Colegas, the homosexual group behind the complaint, say that the Cardinal-elect’s words "clearly incit[e] hate and discrimination,” a crime that they say violates constitutional guarantees.
“Spain is a modern country and a secular one, and these types of declarations from the church have to be punished because [members of the church] are the least qualified to talk about sexual deficiencies, above all because they have hidden cases of child abuse and paedophilia,” Colegas president Antonio Ferre said after filing the complaint.
Public prosecutor Juan Carlos Lopez has begun a preliminary inquiry "to clarify whether the allegations constitute a criminal offence,” reported AFP.
According to Colegas, this is the first time such an investigation has been opened.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, the official compendium of Catholic doctrine, states that while the “psychological genesis” of homosexuality “remains largely unexplained,” nevertheless, homosexual acts are “acts of grave depravity.”
“Tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved,” the Catechism states.
