Legislation permitting de facto and same-sex unions would be so damaging to family life and society that Catholics will do “everything possible” to ensure the laws do not pass, the head of the Pontifical Academy for Life said last week.
“Catholics will do everything to shed light on the debate, and will do everything possible so that these proposals will not pass,” said Bishop Elio Sgreccia, during a press conference at Vatican Radio. “Everything based on untruths is destined to damage someone, if not many people.”
Zenit News Agency reported March 7 on Bishop Sgreccia comments at the Rome launch of a book on the issue by Carlo Casini, a European Parliamentary member representing Italy. Casini’s book was titled “Unioni di fatto, matrimonio, figli: tra ideologia e realtà” (De Facto Unions, Marriage, Children: Between Ideology and Facts), published in Italian by Società Editrice Fiorentina.
Bishop Sgreccia said the Church’s objections to de facto unions simply upheld laws established by international and national legislation, recognizing the family as the foundation of human society. The bishop referred to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights where it states that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state.”
“If family stability is weakened, the fundamental group unit of society is also weakened,” Bishop Sgreccia said.
Homosexual unions would go “against a law of nature,” he said, since “in the corporality of man and woman there is written natural and structural complementarity pertaining to emotional life, sexual life and the procreation of children.”
“Natural law expresses the good sense” of that union between a man and a woman, Bishop Sgreccia said.
Further, the family is essential for economic health and social progress.
“If we wish to see an economy that has as its main unit family health, then we must take into account that the de facto families, constitutionally precarious, are the source, as well as divorce and separations, of social and economic instability.”
Far from encouraging the establishment of de facto unions, “the state would do well in helping youth by teaching them the formation of a true family, with a civic or religious marriage, but stable, and with an eased access to house and work.”
“This is where the money should be spent,” said the bishop, “and not creating marital precariousness.”
Permitting legal unions apart from marriage injures young people by “placing them in a situation that does not give security, that does not give stability or serenity.”
At the same time, legalizing homosexual unions does not address the real needs of people dealing with same-sex attraction, the bishop said.
“[G]ay pride certainly does not help them in overcoming their suffering, which instead must be faced with human understanding, with medical and psychological sciences, and with promotional attitudes of all the good qualities that exist in these persons.”
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