c. 1999 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II attacked same-sex marriages Thursday (Jan. 21) as”deviations from natural laws”and said attempts to justify them distorted the true meaning of human liberty.

Addressing the judges and attorneys of the Roman Rota, the church’s court of appeals for marriage annulments, at the start of the judicial year, the pope expressed strong concern over”a widespread deterioration of the natural and religious sense of marriage.” John Paul said he was issuing a warning that condoning same-sex marriages threatened basic principles of society and”the dignity of every person”not just to Christians but to”all persons concerned with true human progress.” Church doctrine on homosexuality as expressed by John Paul and other Vatican officials holds homosexuality is a disorder but homosexuals should be treated compassionately and that they should remain celibate. Over the years, the Vatican has expressed its opposition to efforts to give gay couples benefits such as pensions and medical coverage.

His remarks were made on the eve of the pontiff’s trip to Mexico and the United States. In the United States the issue of homosexuality, including same-sex marriage, has roiled a number of Protestant denominations and is sharply debated within Catholicism.

The statement was one of the strongest the Roman Catholic pontiff has made on marriage since 1994 when the church joined the United Nations in celebrating the Year of the Family, making it part of the preparations for the year 2000 and the start of the third millennium of Christianity.”As everyone knows,”John Paul said,”today not only the estate and aim of marriage are open to discussion but also the value and the utility of the institution.” He cited”the growing phenomenon of simple de facto unions and the insistent campaigns to influence opinion toward conjugal dignity and unions among persons belonging to the same sex.” Referring to same-sex marriages, the pope said,”these deviations from the natural laws inscribed by God in the nature of the person would seek to find their justifications in liberty, which is the prerogative of the human being.”In reality, it is a pretext for justification,”he added.”To conceive of liberty as moral or also juridical license to infringe the law signifies the distortion of its true nature.” True liberty, he said,”consists of the human being’s possibility of conforming with responsibility, which is to say with personal choice, to the divine will expressed in the law to become thus always more like his Creator.” The pope called it”incongruous”to try”to attribute a `conjugal’ reality to the union of persons of the same sex,”because such unions cannot naturally produce children”according to the project inscribed by God in his structure of the human being.”The Vatican opposes both test tube insemination and adoption of children by couples of the same sex.

Another obstacle, John Paul said, is that the union of two people of the same sex cannot result in”that interpersonal completeness that the Creator desired, as much on the physical-biological plane as on that (which is) eminently psychological, between the man and the woman.”It is only in the union between two persons sexually diverse that the perfection of the individual can be accomplished in a synthesis of unity and of mutual psycho-physical completeness,”the pope said.”In this perspective, love is not an end in itself and is not reduced to a corporal encounter between two beings but is a deep interpersonal relation that reaches its crowning in full reciprocal giving.” The pope said that in attacking same-sex marriage his intention was not to”insist on deploring and condemnation.””I desire rather to recall, not only to those who belong to the Church of Christ Our Lord but also to all persons concerned with true human progress, the gravity and the irreplaceability of some principles that are basic for human society and still more so to safeguard the dignity of every person,”John Paul said.

DEA END POLK