By Hilary White
PARIS, April 26, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A group of homosexual activists were fined a token 1 Euro yesterday for staging a mock marriage ceremony in June 2005 in one of Christendom’s most revered cathedrals, Notre Dame de Paris.
A Paris court ruled that the group Act Up Paris had violated the freedom of religion when they staged the fake ceremony without permission from the cathedral.
“The provocative act of June 2005 and the unrest it caused shocked many people of different faiths, whether believers or not, both in France and beyond,” the Paris archdiocese said in a statement after the ruling.
Notre Dame’s website carries the official statement of the diocese, “[The people] are reassured today that the right to religious freedom is reaffirmed and the peaceful exercise of the worship, according to the tradition of our country”.
In June 2005 two women in wedding dresses walked up the aisle of Notre Dame and an activist dressed as a priest conducted a mock ceremony. The women exchanged rings and kissed while tourists looked on in shock. During the mock ceremony, other activists from Act Up Paris handed out leaflets denouncing the Catholic Church as “homophobic”. Other Act UP members chanted, “Pope Benedict XVI, homophobe, AIDS accomplice.”
A priest at the scene had stronger words for those desecrating his cathedral. Monsignor Patrick Jacquin suffered a minor neck injury in an altercation with the gay activists. Jacquin said he was considering filing charges against what he called “barbaric, odious and scandalous acts.”
“They are savages. I was pushed to the ground and trampled, kicked in the neck. It’s a scandal for these people to lash out at me and the pope,” Jacquin told AFP.
Founded in New York in the 1980’s, Act Up is well known for its anti-Catholicism. An action of the group’s New York branch in 1989 became infamous when, during a protest in which activists stormed into St. Patrick’s Cathedral during Mass and threw used condoms at the altar, one of their members desecrated the Eucharist. Having attended Mass and received Communion in the hand, the protester took the consecrated Host to the cathedral’s steps, tore it up and stamped on the pieces to the approving shouts of the gathered crowd.
More recently in France, Act Up Paris was involved in the prosecution of Christian Vanneste, a French MP and professor of philosophy, who said that homosexuality could be a “threat to humanity” because of the intrinsically infertile nature of sex acts between persons of the same sex.
In March this year, the French High Court upheld a lower court decision that the 2004 “marriage” between two men is invalid. French law, however, allows homosexual partners to register a Civil Solidarity Pact.
Act Up Paris has said it will be appealing the Paris Court ruling and the one Euro fine.
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
French MP Faces 6 Months Jail and $30,000 Fine over “Hate Speech” against Homosexuals
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/dec/05121505.html
European Gay Activists Becoming Increasingly Violent, Intolerant of Other Views
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/jun/05060613.html