ROME, February 17, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The head of the Vatican’s office for the family has criticized a decision by Italy’s Court of Cassation, the highest appeals court in the country, which ruled this week that single people can adopt children. The court has “invited” the Italian Parliament to change the law to allow singles to adopt. Italy was one of the last countries in the EU that restricted adoption to legally married couples.
Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, recently said that adoption policies should uphold the “the good of the child, who needs both a father and a mother.”
“Every child,” the cardinal said, “is entitled to a mother and a father, this should be the norm.”
An editorial in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops, warned against changing the practices “only to satisfy a social drift, which does not take into account the greater good of the child to have a father and a mother.”
The ruling is on the case of a woman from Genoa who requested the court to legitimize her adoption of a Belarusian girl. The girl lived with the woman for two years in Russia and then in the United States, where the adoption was declared valid.
Carlo Giovanardi, a Christian Democrat politician, said that the court has no right to overturn laws that have been ratified by Parliament.
He called the decision “the usual use of the magistrates who want to be lawmakers.”
“But they forget that the law on adoption was approved unanimously by Parliament and is applied to married couples in the interest of the child.”
He added that adding single people to the list will be unfair to the thousands of married couples who have waited for years to adopt.
“It becomes a counter-ideological battle that also undermines Italy’s image abroad,” Giovanardi said. “Our country gets 4000 children up for adoption because we guarantee strict and very reliable rules including the presence of a father and a mother.”