Pope signals inter-faith alliance against gay marriage

VATICAN CITY,  (Reuters) – Pope Benedict yesterday signalled the Vatican was ready to forge alliances with other religions against gay marriage, saying the family was threatened “to its foundations” by attempts to change its “true structure”.

The pope’s latest denunciation of gay marriage came in a Christmas address to Vatican officials in which he blended religion, philosophy, anthropology and sociology to illustrate the position of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Vatican has gone on the offensive in response to gains for gay marriage in the United States and Europe, using every possible opportunity to denounce it through papal speeches or editorials in its newspaper or on its radio station.

Throwing the full weight of his office behind a study by France’s chief rabbi on the effects the legalisation of gay marriage would have on children and society, he said:

“There is no denying the crisis that threatens it (the family) to its foundations – especially in the Western world.”

The family had to be protected because it was “the authentic setting in which to hand on the blueprint of human existence”, he added.

Speaking in the frescoed Clementine Hall of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, the 85-year-old pope said the family was being threatened by “a false understanding of freedom” and a repudiation of life-long commitment in heterosexual marriage.

“When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child – essential elements of the experience of being human are lost,” the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics said.

In the speech, one of the most important the pope gives every year, he said people could not “dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being”.
The “pre-ordained duality of man and woman” had to be respected, he said, if families and children were not to lose their place and dignity.
People could not become what he called “abstract human beings” choosing for themselves what their nature would be, added.