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VATICAN CITY, October 16, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A group at the Vatican’s Youth Synod has called for the Catholic Church to pay more attention to homosexuals and the “realities” they face, specifically mentioning “marriage,” surrogate pregnancy, and adoption.
“[…]There is the issue of what to do and how to act with homosexuals, which cannot remain outside of our pastoral activity and other realities such as marriages between homosexuals, wombs for rent, adoption on the part of couples of the same sex, all of which are current issues and favored and sponsored by international governmental institutions,” said a group of Spanish-speaking participants in the Vatican’s month-long youth summit.
This small group was led by Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, a member of Pope Francis’ C9 council of cardinal advisors. The Cardinal has been implicated in a cover-up of homosexual bullying of seminarians in his native Honduras. The controversial cardinal, whose name is also attached to financial corruption, declared that the worldwide abuse crisis was the fabrication of the supposedly “Jewish-controlled” media.
Maradiaga’s group was the only section to discuss homosexuals, surrogacy, and same-sex couples’ adoption of children. The task of the five-language small conversational circles was to discuss the second half of the Instrumentum Laboris (IL) or working document for the Synod for Young People, Faith, and Vocational Discernment.
It is the universal and perennial teaching of the Roman Catholic Church that marriage can take place only between one woman and one man. The Church does not and cannot recognize legalized sexual partnerships between two men or two women as marriage.
The Church also teaches that the deliberate creation of a child outside of his or her parents’ marriage is a grave evil. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses' 'right to become a father and a mother only through each other'” (CCC 2376).
The Catechism also teaches that “a child is not something owed to one” (CCC 2378).
As for same-sex couples adopting other people’s children, the possibility was condemned by Saint John Paul II.
On June 4, 1999, in an address to the Pontifical Council for the Family, the saint said: “… When “de facto unions” claim the right to adopt, they clearly show their disregard for the child’s welfare and the minimum conditions he is owed for proper upbringing.”
John Paul II continued: “… De facto unions” between homosexuals are a deplorable distortion of what should be a communion of love and life between a man and a woman in a reciprocal gift open to life” (L’Osservatore Romano Weekly Edition in English 16 June 1999, page 11).
During his February 20, 1994 Angelus address John Paul II said, “The bond between two men or two women cannot constitute a real family and much less can the right be attributed to that union to adopt children without a family”.
This is not the first time homosexuality has been highlighted positively during the Synod process.
Pro-family leaders were alarmed to see the term “LGBTQ” appear in the Synod’s working document. It was the first time the term had been used in an official Church document. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia condemned the use of the term in the document and asked for its removal.
“There is no such thing as an ‘LGBTQ Catholic’ or a ‘transgender Catholic’ or a ‘heterosexual Catholic,’ as if our sexual appetites defined who we are; as if these designations described discrete communities of differing but equal integrity within the real ecclesial community, the body of Jesus Christ,” he told Pope Francis and members of the Synod of Bishops convened in the Synod Hall earlier this month.
“This has never been true in the life of the Church, and is not true now,” he added.
Last week, a Youth Synod small group moderated by pro-LGBT Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago explicitly questioned the Church’s emphasis on the traditional nuclear family, going so far as to ask for recognition of “other forms of family.”
“Does leadership in the Church require bishops and priests to proclaim the Gospel truth by denying that these are families?” they stated.
Yesterday a lay delegate to the Youth Synod lectured the Catholic Church to cease “discrimination” against homosexuals.
Morales defined homosexuals as people who “have the same rights we have,” who “live their faith within the church,” and who should “feel as children of God, not as problems.” She chided the church for “discrimination” in the form of people who “don’t open arms wide to welcome and accept homosexuals,” though her translated comments do not elaborate on literal examples of this “discrimination.”
In a “small group report” released last week, Maradiaga’s group declared that it is “becoming necessary” for the Church to reform the “whole subject of anthropological challenges” and to revise “very important subjects such as love, sexuality, women, and gender ideology”.