Pope Benedict has a heartwarming message this holiday season. Let's put a stop to the gay... or words to that effect. In his annual State of the Church speech before the Curia yesterday, his holiness made clear that the top priority of the Vatican is to stop the march toward modernity that has already displayed itself in numerous countries and a growing number of states in the US.
Gay marriage is a threat to "traditional marriage" says the Celibate in Chief.
Benedict XVI made the comments in his annual Christmas address to the Vatican bureaucracy, one of his most important speeches of the year. He dedicated it this year to promoting traditional family values in the face of gains by same-sex marriage proponents in the U.S. and Europe and efforts to legalize gay marriage in places like France and Britain.
In his remarks, Benedict quoted the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, in saying the campaign for granting gays the right to marry and adopt children was an "attack" on the traditional family made up of a father, mother and children.
Well. At least it was ecumenical. But I can't help wondering what these Jewish-Christian allies in leadership are basing their ideas of "tradition" upon. Not their holy books, certainly, wherein those "mothers" are little more than transferred property and often consigned to large harems.
Mostly, His Holiness seems to be distressed by the all the gender-bending that goes on.
In his speech, the pope cited Bernheim as lamenting how a new philosophy of sexuality has taken hold, whereby sex and gender are "no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society."
He said God had created man and woman as a specific "duality" – "an essential aspect of what being human is all about."
This follows his "peace message" of a week ago, in which he cited gay marriage as a key threat to world peace. Nothing like a demonstration of love and compassion as the Church prepares to celebrate the birth of Christ.
The pontiff did, however, grant an act of kindness to his former butler, whose Christmas-time pardon was widely anticipated. He will also secure housing and employment for this fallen angel somewhere safely away from Vatican property.
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