c. 2006 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ The Vatican stepped up its attack on nontraditional sexual mores Tuesday (June 6) with a strongly worded document that condemned a wide range of practices, including homosexuality and contraception, as an unprecedented threat to family life.

The tract, which drew from church teaching that has been in place for decades, appeared to sharpen the Vatican’s opposition to gay marriage and birth control just as public debate on those two issues has begun to intensify.

In Washington, the Senate is considering a constitutional ban on gay marriage. At the Vatican, meanwhile, officials are studying moral questions surrounding the church’s ban on condoms as a means of preventing the spread of AIDS.

“Never before in history has human procreation, and therefore the family, which is its natural place, been so threatened as in today’s culture,” the document said, expressing staunch opposition to granting legal recognition to gay couples in any form, including civil unions.

Titled “Family and Human Procreation,” the document was issued by the Pontifical Council for the Family, headed by Colombian hard-liner Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo.

Trujillo has been a controversial advocate for enforcing church teaching in the public square, supporting calls to deny Communion to Roman Catholic politicians who dissent from church teaching on abortion.

The cardinal has also claimed that the HIV virus that causes AIDS is small enough to pass through latex condoms, rendering them ineffective as a form of disease prevention. Current Vatican teaching says sexual abstinence is the only way to prevent the spread of AIDS.

The new document did not address whether condom use was morally acceptable in the context of marriage when one partner is infected with the disease, a position that has been supported by a handful of top cardinals recently.

Instead, the document restated the Vatican’s ban on contraception in the 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae.”

“The causes are diverse but the eclipse of God, creator of man, is at the root of the profound current crisis concerning the truth about man, about human procreation and the family,” the document said.

The document also condemned stem cell research, in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination as violations of a human’s “right to be generated, not produced.”

KRE/PH END MEICHTRY