Six more votes for 'gay' unions

Sandro Magister
Chiesa
June 10, 2013

VATICAN CITY – " The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions."

In fact:

"The common good requires that laws recognize, promote and protect marriage as the basis of the family, the primary unit of society. Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity."

Therefore:

"The Church cannot fail to defend these values, for the good of men and women and for the good of society itself."

These are the concluding phrases of the "Considerations regarding proposals to give legal recognition to unions between homosexual persons" of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith (CDF), readily available on the website of the dicastery:

> Considerations…

The document bears the signature of the cardinal prefect of the congregation at the time, Joseph Ratzinger, today “supreme pontiff emeritus,” and of then-archbishop secretary Angelo Amato, a Salesian, today the cardinal prefect of the congregation for the causes of saints.

It was approved on March 28, 2003 by Blessed John Paul II and published on the following June 3, the feast day of St. Charles Lwanga and companions, martyrs .

A commemoration not chosen by coincidence. In the Roman martyrology it is in fact recalled that St. Charles Lwanga and his twelve martyr companions - between the ages of fourteen and thirty, belonging to the royal court of young nobles or to the bodyguard of King Mwanga, neophytes or fervent followers of the Catholic faith - having refused to consent to the vile requests of the king, were run through with the sword or burned alive on Namugongo hill in Uganda. Where 'vile requests' is taken to mean the homosexual desires of the 'dissolute' King Mwanga.

Ten years have passed since the publication of that document by the Ratzingerian CDF under the pontificate of Karol Wojtyla. In the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church, June 3 continues to be celebrated in honor of the holy martyrs of Uganda canonized by Paul VI in 1964, even if it would be interesting to find out how many understand the reasons for their supreme sacrifice. But the contents of the “considerations” cited above seem by now to belong to another ecclesial era.

One faithful mirror of this new course are the declarations released to the press by Cardinal Godfried Danneels, archbishop emeritus of Mechelen-Brussels, on the eve of his eightieth birthday on June 4.

The Belgian cardinal - who without hypocrisy did not conceal his disappointment at the election of Benedict XVI at the conclave of 2005, and this year was one of the main electors of Pope Francis - stated that the Church “has never opposed the fact that there should exist a sort of 'marriage' between homosexuals, but one therefore speaks of a 'sort of' marriage, not of true marriage between a man and a woman, therefore another word must be found for the dictionary.”

And he concluded:

“About the fact that this should be legal, that it should be made legitimate through a law, about this the Church has nothing to say.”

The Belgian newspaper "Le Soir," in reporting the words of Danneels, added that “the position of the cardinal is shared by Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard," his successor as archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels. The newspaper does not provide the evidence for this agreement. But there is no doubt that Danneels has effectively said, with the frankness that distinguishes him, what other cardinals and prelates have said in recent months.

The media, in fact, have recently reported favorable words on the legal recognition of homosexual unions on the part of at least four leading representatives of the hierarchy of the Church:

- Archbishop Piero Marini, president of the pontifical committee for Eucharistic congresses and formal master of papal ceremonies;

- Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the pontifical council for the family, who afterward corrected himself;

- Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna;

- Colombian Cardinal Rubén Salazar Gómez, archbishop of Bogotà, this latter forced to make a rapid retraction before he received the cardinal's biretta in November of 2012.

Last April 24 the “Vatican spokesman,” Fr. Federico Lombardi, also spoke out on the matter when asked about the definitive parliamentary approval on the part of the French national assembly for “gay marriage,” responding that one must “clearly emphasize that marriage between a man and a woman is a specific and fundamental institution in the history of humanity. This does not change the fact that there could be some recognition of other forms of union between two persons.”

Asked afterward what the papal reaction might be to the French decision, Fr. Lombardi said: “It is the pope who must speak, I will let him talk.”

The fact is that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has so far not uttered one syllable on the French decision to elevate homosexual civil unions to marriage, although these had already been legitimate for years under the name of “Pacte Civile de Solidarité," PACS.

Nor did the pope wish to proffer a word on the argument when on May 23 he met for the first time with the bishops of the Italian episcopal conference, the Church of which he is primate “ex officio.”

....

Taking as a paradigm what the catechetical tradition calls the four sins that “cry out for vengeance in the sight of God” (according to the terminology of the catechism of St. Pius X) or " cry out to heaven for vengeance” (according to the1992 catechism of Ratzinger and Wojtyla), pope Bergoglio has so far demonstrated that he considers the priority of his preaching, as also in his first address to new diplomats accredited with the Holy See, to point his finger at the social significance of the last two sins - the oppression of the poor and defrauding workers of their wages - rather than that of the second: the sin of the sodomites.

__________ Last March 19, six days after the election of Pope Francis, the “New York Times” wrote that when - between 2009 and 2010 - the debate was raging in Argentina over the introduction of “gay marriage,” then-cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was in favor of a compromise solution that would have legitimized civil unions for persons of the same sex.

What really happened is controversial. According to reliable journalistic reconstructions, during the meeting of the episcopal conference the Argentine bishops effectively discussed how to address the question. And in the end the stance that prevailed was not that of the “doves” personified by Bergoglio, but that of the “hawks” led by the archbishop of La Plata, Héctor Rubén Aguer.

The divergence, nonetheless, was not about opposing “gay marriage,” but about how to do it and about the acceptability of a compromise that would admit civil unions without using the word 'marriage.'

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read original article at Chiesa