Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Church will cancel registration to celebrate legal marriages

The Catholic Church will cancel registration to conduct legal marriages if hand forced on same-sex unions, says Perth's Archbishop Hickey. 

If the state forced the Perth archdiocese to officiate at same-sex unions, the archdiocese would cancel its registration to celebrate legal marriages, Archbishop Barry Hickey said last Sunday.

His comments were made to members of the Traditional Anglican Church parish of St Ninian and St Chad in Maylands.

However, whether the Church would bury dead Catholics who had entered into same-sex unions was something of which he was less certain, he said.

Answering a question from a member of the congregation, the archbishop said he had “very, very serious concerns” about recent moves to amend the Marriage Act.

“We can’t celebrate them,” Archbishop Hickey said. “The ban on sodomy is still there. We can’t bless a relationship with an inbuilt defect in it ... We’ve got nothing against people loving one another; it’s the sexual content that makes it difficult for us.”

The archbishop said he thought the Australian Constitution would have to be changed before same-sex marriage could be passed. 

Nevertheless, if the push for same-sex marriage succeeded, the Church would continue to celebrate marriage as it always had.

“We might be back to the ghetto. We cannot do those marriages at all. And if the law forces us to, we cancel our registration as marriage celebrants. We just don’t do it,” the Archbishop said.

“We continue to perform Church marriages but we can’t perform the marriage where there is a basic objection.”

The Church would survive, he said, because the Holy Spirit was stronger than the law, providing strength to withstand persecution.

The other major issue was whether the Church could bury people who entered what it regarded as morally illicit unions.

“Do we bury them? I haven’t worked that out yet,” he said.

“It is the Christian duty to bury the dead, to forgive sins, and to say it’s all in the hands of God.

“It might be case by case; I just don’t know,” the archbishop said.

The Tasmanian Parliament passed a motion earlier this month supporting same-sex marriage and calling on the federal government to amend the law.

The motion passed with the support of Labor and the Greens, putting pressure on federal Labor to change its stance.

The prime minister, Julia Gillard, has expressed her support for marriage as currently defined in the Marriage Act.

In August, just 30 of Australia’s 150 lower house MPs chose to speak on their constituents’ views on same-sex marriage, with responses reported both for and against.