By NICOLE WINFIELD 12/21/12 06:10 PM ET EST 
VATICAN CITY — The pope pressed his opposition to gay marriage Friday, denouncing what he described as people eschewing their God-given gender 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 gains by same-sex marriage proponents in the U.S. and Europe and efforts to legalize gay marriage in places like France and Britain.
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 currently 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. The Vatican went on a similar anti-gay marriage media blitz last month after three U.S. states approved gay marriage by popular vote.
After the peace message was released last week, gay activists staged a small protest in St. Peter’s Square. On Friday, gay activists sharply criticized the pope’s take on gender theory and insisted that where gay marriage has been legalized, families are no worse off.
Italy’s main gay rights group Arcigay called the pope’s comments “absurd, dangerous and totally out of synch with reality.” And a coalition of four U.S. Catholic organizations representing gay, lesbian and transgender people said the pope had an “outmoded” view of what it means to be man and woman.
“Increasingly Catholics in the United States and around the world see what we see. Catholics, following their own well-formed consciences, are voting to support equal rights for LGBT people because in their churches and communities they see a far healthier, godly and realistic vision of the human family than the one offered by the pope,” according to a statement from the groups Call To Action, DignityUSA, Fortunate Families, and New Ways Ministry.
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. In addition to the U.S. election gains, the Constitutional Court in largely Roman Catholic Spain upheld the law legalizing gay marriage last month. 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.
Jean. Thank you for sharing. I understand this issue touches you on many more levels than it does me. The sincerety in your communication has my deepest respect.
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And I agree, the issue is a big one. We’ll leave it at that.
As it is Xmas eve as I write this, I wish you all the best for the coming holidays and the year to come! I bet we still have some good discussions to look forward to
The meaning of the word ‘marriage’ needs to be watered out to cater for all the new groups that wants to be included as candidates for a ‘marriage’.
In my opinion we are on our way to loose the right to limit marriage to only include two people. Why should we? It’s kind of old fashioned, isn’t it?
So when the fundamental muslim comes along and says that 4 wives is what he wants; How are we in the position to say ‘No’?
Bjorn – and EVERYONE, I’m not quite sure what you are saying here, but let me share that Drunvalo told us that there are about 64 different kinds of sexuality in the Universe. Let your mind play with that one, and maybe you will come to the conclusion that it behooves us to stay out of other people’s sexual lives and their expression of their sexuality. . . at least, that’s my take on this one. Aren’t all people entitled to experience love? And is it up to us to say how/when/if they experience it? Is it really any of our business? Haven’t we each got enough inner work on our own plates, without getting involved in other people’s lives?
I’m just offering some food for thought. . .
Hugs,
~Jean
PS Please consider how much of our attitude toward sexuality might be a result of our ‘divisive’ programming inculcated almost since our birth!
Jean. Thank you for your reply. Short statements are easy to misunderstand.
64 types og sexuality. Fine, I accept all of them. That includes homosexuality.
What I am after is the definition of the word marriage.
As a side: I do not believe it is any governments business to allow or disallow any type of coexistence between people within proper age limits, and as long as nobody is harmed. It is none of the governments business. The Pope can try to define the rules for his own church, but I am not one to follow his recommendations anyway.
So what is marriage? In my opinion, if we are to break up the word from meaning anything else than the society’s ‘production unit’ mom-dad-child, as it was meant to protect, then I agree with the Swedish Feminist party: remove marriage as an institution. The word is then meaningless anyways.
Bjorn, in my opinion government has no right whatsoever to control marriage and who lives with whom! The government has no right to define ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in this regard. I totally agree with you on this. I was brought up in a horribly dysfunctional situation, was abused sexually as a three-year-old, and then abused – read that totally controlled – by my mother, who found in my talents a means for her to have a life. It was a horrible existence, and I knew nothing about its cause until late in my life. The woman with whom I did my healing work told me without the drugs I lived on for over forty years, I likely would have gone insane. This, Bjorn, is not an untypical situation in many marriages, although mine might have been extreme.
When I lived on Capitol Hill and would go to concerts on the West Lawn of the Capitol, I would watch same-sex couple arrive there with their children, and I can’t tell you how many times I wished I could have exchanged my childhood existence for the existence these children had with parents who were so very able to love their children. Did these parents have issues? I do not doubt that they did, because people who don’t fit the sexual prescriptions of our sick society surely have had a hard time just trying to survive! Yet, I could see that they were still able to love their kids far more than my parents could love me – and I’d realized by then that love is the key. Even if our parents make mistakes, if they are able to love us, as we mature we will realize this and accept their own humanity. I wouldn’t have cared who my parents were if society weren’t sick concerning ‘parenting’ so that I wouldn’t have been excluded because of who my parents were – if they only could have loved me.
I guess your words pushed my buttons, because marriage as we have learned of it should have no meaning. It is a means to control and tax people and their children. People stay in loveless marriages, and children suffer. Everything is so totally out of focus on this subject, and I think it will be many years before we begin to get it right. Also, I feel like I have only touched the tiniest surface of this topic, which is huge and needs to be discussed very thoroughly over a period of time.
People need to begin to understand the sickness the matrix has perpetrated in this regard. While, because of their own sexuality, people may have for whatever reason a personal aversion to the way others express their own sexuality, it is truly none of our business – as long as no one is hurt. When I hear the ‘right’ talking about the hurt to children from these unions, it feels very much like an hysterical response to me, by reason of the fact that many of our public figures on the right are themselves involved secretly in these kinds of unions or in extra-marital situations, etc. They aren’t practicing what they preach, while they act holier-than-thou! It’s all about lies and control, and they, themselves, don’t even get it. The Church has men walking around in dresses, forbidden to express their sexuality! Does it get any more twisted than that? If the truth be known, I believe the Church has long been afraid of the feminine. . . but, guess what everyone! We’re back, and we’re not going away. . . just my opinion, of course. . .
Enough! I’ve said quite enough!
Hugs,
~Jean