Catholic Conference Speaker Warns of Consequences of Gay Adoption

c. 2006 Religion News Service ROME _ A priest and psychotherapist at a Catholic conference on homosexuality condemned adoption by gay couples Thursday (Feb. 23), saying it will lead to social problems for years to come. “You turn their sense of reality upside down. It’s a social lie,” said the Rev. Tony Anatrella, a psychology […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

ROME _ A priest and psychotherapist at a Catholic conference on homosexuality condemned adoption by gay couples Thursday (Feb. 23), saying it will lead to social problems for years to come.

“You turn their sense of reality upside down. It’s a social lie,” said the Rev. Tony Anatrella, a psychology professor and consultant at the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and the Family in Rome. “This creates a risk of a crisis in reproduction that in a few generations’ time will lead to psychotic pathologies.”


The conference, held at a time when same-sex marriage has become a political issue in Italy as in other countries, drew a handful of gay protesters.

It’s not the first time Anatrella has been outspoken on the subject, with the Vatican’s apparent blessing. In an article published in the Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper, he defined homosexuality as “an alteration of sexual identity.” Though not calling homosexuality an illness, he wrote it “falls into a category of personality disorders, deriving from unresolved inter-psychic conflicts.”

A practicing psychotherapist, Anatrella told the conference that sexuality is acquired, not innate, as Sigmund Freud said. “There is not one study showing that a gene produces homosexuality,” said Anatrella, who said he treats 15 homosexual patients, and sometimes their families, each week.

Homosexuals compensate for a lack of confidence, rooted in their childhoods, by seeking out sexual partners who are similar to them, Anatrella said.

When homosexual couples demand the “right” to have children, Anatrella said, they are effectively using the children to “calm down” their anxieties and valorize themselves as adults.

Children suffer as a result, he said.

“Children need a mother and a father, they need to be inserted in successive generations,” he said.

Other speakers at the conference used more conciliatory language.

The Catholic Church does not and should not use the words “illness” and “abnormal” to describe homosexuality, according to the conference’s organizer, professor Mario Binasco.


“These words are from the 18th century,” he said Thursday.

The Vatican last Nov. 29 issued a document that bars openly gay men from entering the priesthood and disallows gay ordained priests from teaching at Catholic seminaries. The document was a clarification of decades of church teaching that labeled homosexuality “objectively disordered.”

Another speaker at the conference, David Crawford, professor of moral theology and family law at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, said the health of society is at risk.

“Gay rights seek a reconfiguration of society on the basis of gay anthropology,” which defines relationships through “fluctuating desires” and an “empty freedom based on pure spontaneity,” Crawford told the conference.

The church instead insists on “sexual difference” between men and women as absolute truth. What Crawford calls “the vocation to love” is built into this structure of differentiation.

“Any society that is not built around this understanding of the human person, that does not support it, is quite simply to that extent an inhuman society,” Crawford said.

For a small group at the conference who wore signs stating “I am gay” on their chests, these Catholic experts had it all wrong.


“It was the same old story of inciting discrimination against people who do not fit into the model of dominant society, which is encouraged and supported by the clergy and the Vatican hierarchy,” said Andrea Falconetti, a member of the Facciamo Breccia association for gay rights, whose name refers to the “breaking down” of the gate in Rome that effectively wrested Rome from papal authority in 1870.

“We don’t expect them to change their views,” Falconetti said of Vatican officials. “But they should stay inside the Vatican walls and not invade the outside world where diversity flourishes naturally.”

Recognition of same-sex marriage in Italy, and the church’s opposition to it, has become campaign fodder for general elections in April, as groups on the left push for its inclusion on the center-left platform.

But the church did not have a political agenda in organizing the seminar, said Sandro Magister, Vatican expert and journalist for the Italian magazine Espresso.

“The Church is trying to give a general sense of direction on these issues in today’s culture,” he said, adding that such seminars are organized months in advance so recent political events are merely coincidental.

The church has, however, criticized the gay movement in Italy. Monsignor Livio Melina, the dean of the seminar’s organizing institute, said in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that the gay movement is antagonistic to the concept of family and human love.


“The gay movement is a powerful and pervasive cultural development,” Melina said. “It gives the impression of wanting to compensate for guilt through the legal and cultural legitimization of gay couples.”

MO/PH END RNS

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