c. 2000 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ The Vatican warned Tuesday (Nov. 21) that giving legal status to unmarried couples and to homosexual relationships would cause “grave damage” to the institution of the family and to society as a whole.

The Pontifical Council for the Family issued the warning in a 77-page document, “Family, Marriage and `De Facto’ Unions,” addressed not only to Roman Catholics but to all Christians as well as “all those who are sincerely committed to the precious good of the family, the fundamental cell of society.”

Attacking proposals to make de facto unions equal under law with marriage, the council said it wanted “to call attention to the danger that such recognition and equivalence would represent for the identity of the matrimonial union and the grave damage this would entail for the family and the common good of society.”

“The good generated by marriage is basic for the church, which recognizes the family as the `domestic church,”’ the document said. “All this is endangered by abandoning the institution of marriage, which is implicit in de facto unions.”

The council did not break any new ground but spelled out in detail the reasoning behind the Vatican’s opposition to all unions but the traditional family based on marriage between a man and a woman.

The document, which grew out of a series of meetings with experts held in 1999 and early 2000, said the family is in crisis today in part because of a “privatization of love and the elimination of the institutional character of marriage.”

“De facto unions do not imply marital rights and duties, and they do not presume to have the stability that is based on the marriage bond,” the document said. And, it said, there is an “essential and very profound difference between conjugal love that comes from the institution of marriage and homosexual relationships.”

The council leveled sharp criticism at what it called an “ideology of gender,” which it said holds that there are a number of possible genders determined not by sex but by culture.

“Claiming a similar status for marriage and de facto unions (including homosexual unions) is usually justified today on the basis of categories and terms that come from the ideology of gender,” it said. “In this way, there is a certain tendency to give the name family to all kinds of consensual unions.”

The council said the thinking of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir and the sexual revolution of the 1960s all contributed to the ideology of gender.

Taking issue with the argument that refusing legal recognition to unmarried couples is discriminatory, the council called the argument “a serious sign of the contemporary breakdown in the social moral conscience.”

“The pretext used for exerting pressure to recognize de facto unions (i.e., their `non-discrimination’) implies a real discrimination against the family based on marriage because it would be considered on a level similar to any other form of cohabitation, regardless of whether there is a commitment to reciprocal fidelity and the begetting and upbringing of children or not,” the document said.

“De facto unions are the result of private behavior and should remain on the private level,” it concluded. “Their public recognition or equivalency to marriage and the resulting elevation of a private interest to a public interest damages the family based on marriage.”

The council said “making homosexual relations equivalent to marriage is much more grave” even than recognizing de facto unions and would carry “serious social consequences.”

Quoting from an address by Pope John Paul II to the council last year, the document said, “De facto unions between homosexuals are a deplorable distortion of what should be a communion of love and life between a man and a woman in a reciprocal gift open to life.”

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In a separate document also issued Tuesday, the council reported on the conclusions of its Theological-Pastoral Congress on Children: Springtime of the Family and Society, held in Rome Oct. 11-13.

Calling the sexual exploitation of children and all forms of violence against them crimes against humanity, the council called for laws to combat “grave offenses against children’s dignity.”

“Are we not dealing with crimes against humanity?” it asked, urging that the crimes be “recognized as such and punished, not only in the places where they happen but also in the countries from which their perpetrators come.”

The council said children also are threatened by “the spread of drug abuse, sexual promiscuity and other lifestyles” presented to them “as if they were forms of freedom or an expression of modernity.”

DEA END POLK