DOHA, Qatar, November 30, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – One of the Vatican’s highest-ranking prelates said at a conference today, “An ideology hostile to the family is spreading” in governments around the world.
Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, spoke at the International Conference on the Family organized in Doha, the capital of Qatar by the World Congress of Families. The Cardinal’s address was called, “The Complementarity of Men and Women – Building on the Strengths of Mothers and Fathers.” In many countries the push for same-sex “marriage” has caused confusion among Catholics who are often told that matters of justice and human rights are at stake. Even bishops have made ambiguous statements that can be seen to be supportive of civil recognition of homosexual relationships. Trujillo on the other hand clearly emphasized the necessity of opposing any incursions against marriage in civil law. “Recognition of ‘de facto’ unions,” he said, “which are a legal fiction, proposing same-sex unions as an alternative to marriage, and inventing new, unacceptable notions of marriage to the point of accepting the adoption of children, are grave signs of dehumanization.” The Vatican has watched anxiously as the European Union as well as governments overseas have worked to undermine the family as the foundation of civil society – first by legalizing civil divorce, contraception and abortion, and then ultimately enacting laws making homosexual partnerships equal to marriage.
Cardinal Trujillo said that the family is founded upon marriage, which is not a product of European cultural bias, but rather a standard for all human societies. He added, “One truth that is present in a profound way in all cultures and religions is that of the family based on marriage, the only worthy and appropriate place for conjugal love.” The fruit of marriage, the “complete, reciprocal self-giving” says the Cardinal, is the child which he called “God’s most precious gift.”
Cardinal Trujillo denounced the Marxist-feminist critique of the family which attempts to portray it as a kind of economic slavery. He said, “In the past decade, the complementarity between a man and a woman and the overcoming of any opposition between the sexes have strangely been negated. The abuses deriving from a certain kind of ‘male chauvinist’ domination …are not valid arguments for an exacerbated feminism that considers marriage and the family a place of slavery, and fatherhood and motherhood an unbearable burden that turns into fear.” hw