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Monday July 4, 2005
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Vatican Blasts Canada for "Violent Attacks Against the Family"
ROME, July 4, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, has characterized the recent passage of Canada's Bill C-38 as a manifestation of "violent attacks aimed at the natural family -- based on a union between a man and a woman."
The Vatican newspaper paper's theme is a reiteration of then-Cardinal Ratzinger's 2003 document, "Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons." The official teaching document from the Catholic Church's highest doctrinal authority was widely vilified and it particularly infuriated left-leaning Canadian Catholic politicians who habitually support socialist pet causes.
Unfortunately the document, written by now Pope Benedict, was also seen as "a problem" or an embarassment by most of the Catholic Church establishment in Canada with the secretary general of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops regularly undermining Considerations" in his comments to the media. In Aug 2003 The Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops' lay advisory committee on the marriage issue recommended that the OCCB promote the document in all Ontario parishes. An inexpensive to produce, compact format of the document was provided. The OCCB executive bishops rejected the proposal without comment and instead decided to focus primarily on a non-controversial campaign to promote church teaching on the benefits and meaning of marriage.
Considerations identified what Pope Benedict later called the 'pseudo-matrimony' then being proposed for legalization, as an attack on the nature of the human person and the meaning of the family. It instructed Catholic legislators that they could not vote in favour of such legislation and remain good Catholics. "The considerations", it said, "are also intended to give direction to Catholic politicians by indicating the approaches to proposed legislation in this area which would be consistent with Christian conscience."
"There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God's plan for marriage and family." The document said Catholic legislators are bound by their conscience to vote down any such legislation.
"Under no circumstances can they be approved," Ratzinger wrote. "Clear and emphatic opposition is a duty… it is necessary to oppose legal recognition of homosexual unions."
In early June, Pope Benedict XVI said that the equation of homosexuality with marriage was contributing to the "dissolution of matrimony," and the undermining of the social supports of society.
In a speech to a conference on families held by the Diocese of Rome, the Pope said, "The various forms of the dissolution of matrimony today, like free unions, trial marriages and going up to pseudo-matrimonies by people of the same sex, are rather expressions of an anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom of man."
Read highlights of the Vatican document:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/jul/030731b.html
U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference President Welcomes Vatican 'Considerations'
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/aug/03080608.html
General Secretary of Can. Bishops Conference Minimizes New Vatican Document
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/aug/03080101.html
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