It seems almost ironic, (when they are in trouble over a sexual matter), that they would ‘come out’ with such a strong stand against same-sex couples. Granted, the Church’s position about the meaning of “marriage” has been rigidly set for centuries. It has been loosened in the past twenty-five years with the growth of the numbers of couples who have gotten divorced. Still, its position is set. The statement that came out of the Vatican about same-sex marriages was done with such hatred that it came as a blow in spite of the fact it was not a surprise.
National Public Radio and The Washington Post reported this month that Pope Benedict XVI delivered an address at the Vatican to a delegation of visiting bishops from the United States. In it, he forcefully denounced the “powerful” push to grant same-sex couples the freedom to marry in the United States.
From the NPR article:
The 84-year-old pope acknowledged his comments might sound anachronistic or “countercultural,” particularly to the young. But he told bishops to not back down in the face of “powerful political and cultural currents seeking to alter the legal definition of marriage.”
“Sexual differences cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the definition of marriage,” he said…
Benedict said a weakened appreciation for traditional marriage … had led to “grave social problems bearing an immense human and economic cost.”
The visiting delegation included bishops from Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota. It was led by Twin Cities Archbishop John Nienstedt, who has inserted himself more deeply into the battle over civil marriage than perhaps any other Catholic bishop across the country. Nienstedt is the same priest who injected a prayer for marriage discrimination into the Catholic Mass, turning the Eucharist—which is sacred to Catholics—into a weapon with which to marginalize and exclude LGBT people. He told the priests of his diocese that if any of them dared to oppose the Church’s efforts to write its discriminatory teachings on marriage into the state constitution, they had better keep their mouths shut.
Pope Benedict’s words, delivered to a group of bishops headed by one of the most notoriously anti-gay figures in the American Catholic Church, amount to nothing less than an official endorsement of the United States’ Catholic Bishops’ all-out campaign of spiritual bullying and forceful political lobbying against American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, couples, and families.
It is difficult to even imagine the leader of a religion cloaking anti-gay hatred with the mantle of faith to such an unprecedented degree. His address explicitly endorses malicious religion-based bigotry. At a time when the Roman Catholic Church is in such a publicly controversial position it is almost surprising that such statements would be made. Almost…
