The pope
pressed his opposition to gay marriage Friday, denouncing what he
described as people manipulating their God-given identities to suit
their sexual choices – and destroying the very "essence of the human
creature" in the process.
Benedict XVI made the comments in his annual Christmas address to the
Vatican bureaucracy, one of his most important speeches of the year. He
dedicated it this year to promoting traditional family values in the
face of vocal campaigns in France, the United States, Britain and
elsewhere to legalize same-sex marriage.
In his remarks, Benedict quoted the chief rabbi of France,
Gilles Bernheim, in saying the campaign for granting gays the right to
marry and adopt children was an "attack" on the traditional family made
up of a father, mother and children.
"People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by
their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human
being," he said. "They deny their nature and decide that it is not
something previously given to them, but that they make it for
themselves."
"The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our
environment is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he
himself is concerned," he said.
It was the second time in a week that Benedict has taken on the
question of gay marriage, which is dividing France, and which scored big
electoral wins in the United States last month. In his recently
released annual peace message, Benedict said gay marriage, like abortion
and euthanasia, was a threat to world peace.
After the peace message was released last week, gay activists staged a small protest in St. Peter's Square.
Church teaching holds that homosexual acts are "intrinsically
disordered," though it stresses that gays should be treated with
compassion and dignity.
As pope and as head of the Vatican's orthodoxy
watchdog before that, Benedict has been a strong enforcer of that
teaching: One of the first major documents released during his
pontificate said men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies shouldn't
be ordained priests.
For the Vatican, though, the gay marriage issue goes beyond questions
of homosexuality, threatening what the church considers to be the
bedrock of society: a family based on a man, woman and their children.
In
his speech, the pope cited Bernheim as lamenting how a new "philosophy
of sexuality" has taken hold, whereby sex and gender are "no longer a
given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense
of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past
it was chosen for us by society."
He said God had created man and woman as a specific "duality" – "an essential aspect of what being human is all about."
Now, though, "Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of
the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his own nature into
question. From now on he is merely spirit and will."
The Vatican's opposition to gay marriage has been falling largely on
deaf ears. Under then-Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the
largely Roman Catholic Spain legalized gay marriage.
Three U.S. states
approved same-sex marriage by popular vote in November elections.
Earlier this month, the British government announced it will introduce a
bill next year legalizing gay marriage, though it would ban the Church
of England from conducting same-sex ceremonies.
In France, President Francois Hollande has said he would enact his
"marriage for everyone" plan within a year of taking office last May.
The text will go to parliament next month. But the country has been
divided by vocal opposition from religious leaders, prime among them
Bernheim, as well as some politicians and parts of rural France.
The Socialist government's plan also envisions legalizing same-sex
adoptions. Benedict quoted Bernheim as denouncing the plan, saying that
it would mean a child would essentially be considered an object people
have a right to obtain.
"When freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself,
then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is
stripped of his dignity as a creature of God," Benedict said.