VATICAN CITY — Faced with recent setbacks in the United States and in Europe, the Catholic Church has intensified its increasingly uphill battle against gay “marriage.” The latest salvo came Dec. 17 with a front-page article in the Vatican’s semiofficial newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. Historian Lucetta Scaraffia compared proponents of gay “marriage,” with their championing of “marriage equality,” to 20th-century communists who wooed millions with their promise of perfect equality.
Scaraffia, a 64-year-old former feminist activist who later became a fervent Catholic, has often written in the Vatican newspaper on the issue. For her, the idea of gay “marriage” is a product of the same “egalitarian utopia that did so much damage during the 20th century … deceiving humanity as socialism did in the past.”
Pope Benedict XVI also has spoken out on the issue. In his yearly message on peace, released Dec. 14, he said that protecting traditional marriage from “attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of unions” is not a faith issue.
Marriage’s “indispensable role in society” is “inscribed in human nature itself,” he wrote. So the church’s efforts to protect it are not “confessional in character, but addressed to all people, whatever their religious affiliation.” In her L’ Osservatore Romano article, Scaraffia echoed and developed Benedict’s argument. To equate a traditional marriage with a union between homosexuals amounts to a “negation of truth,” which would undermine “one of the basic structures of human society, family,” she wrote. In the long run, she concluded, societies will end up paying “a very high price” for destroying family, “as it happened in the past with the attempts to create a complete social and economical equality.”
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