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Eclipse of God: Gay Marriages and Vatican's reaction

Antonio Fabrizio - 6/17/2006

On Tuesday, June 6th, in a document titled “Family and human procreation”, the Pontifical Council for the Family asserted its strong commitment to traditional family and emphasized the risks related to a misuse of abortion and in-vitro fertilization, stating also that feminism contributed to shape the crisis of the current society1.

The Council condemned the proposal to put homosexual and heterosexual couples on the same level: it asserted that “unusual couples” should not be allowed to obtain the same rights acknowledged to the usual couples, because they do not have the same type of foundation. The current crisis of values, according to the document, would be directly linked to this kind of requests, which are morally inadmissible for the Church because they “threaten” the traditional family. As the document stated, only a form of love between a man and a woman should be considered as the foundation of the human family. Forms of love which are different from the traditional one would be, as the Pope himself declared on May 11, “weak”.

The document also stated that PACS – civil pacts of solidarity, a form of civil union allowing gay couples to gain recognition of their rights as couples and not only as individuals, but nominally and legally different from marriage – would under any circumstance represent a danger for the values of Christian society, symbolizing what is powerfully defined as the “eclipse of God”.

The document then criticized abortion, stating that it is not acceptable to let it unpunished, since it represents an “abominable crime” and no crime should be converted into a right; it also stated that a “responsible motherhood and a fatherhood” should refuse every kind of contraception and limit the “use of marriage” only to “fertile periods”. Moreover, it criticized in-vitro fertilization, affirming that life is not a “matter of technology”. Feminism, according to the paper, contributed to the crisis of the humankind, because it accentuated the “polemic character” of the relationship between men and women, inciting to an overcoming of the traditional family.

The reference to gay marriages, however, remains central. In few months, due to the implications of the issue and to the proposal of many Italian politicians to regulate this matter, allowing certain rights to gay couples, the Vatican has concentrated dozens of repeated attacks to the requests of gay community members, emphasizing the need to put a blockage to their expectations.

A fact which many secular politicians and institutions highly criticize, stating that the Vatican is a sovereign state on its own territory, but has not right to enter the Italian political debate, because Italy is sovereign on its own territory, too; and that no interferences should be allowed to a country into a foreign country’s domestic affairs.

Gay community also reacted; activist group Arcigay spokesman Grillini2 highlighted that it is incomprehensible how Church leaders can attack gay legitimate requests and refer to them as the “eclipse of God”.

Many affirmed that other reasons, not certainly PACS, should witness this “eclipse”: holocaust, violence on unarmed people, abuses on children, useless wars, poverty worldwide. Yet the Church does not mention them as often.

Many politicians and organizations also highlight that western parliaments have been asked to give legislative regulation to a significant issue, in order to recognize the rights of those same-sex couples who decide to live their lives together and ask to have these rights clearly shaped. Laws regulating same-sex relationships have been approved in many European countries (the first ones to introduce these regulations were northern countries), including Spain, United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and overseas (Canada and some US states)3.

In some cases a law equalizing gay marriages to heterosexual marriages has been approved; in other cases a new institution, called PACS or named differently, has been created; however, lawmakers have tried to fill up a “gap”, recognizing a basic principle in western world countries: the principle that all social formations which originate inside their societies deserve to be taken into consideration and have to be recognized, regulated in their duties and rights, and protected against external abuse.

Nonetheless in Italy, the country which is mostly influenced by Vatican opinions, because they practically share the same territory, even though they are formally separated, it seems to be a very tough task to find agreements: the claim to forbid gay marriages is both issued by conservative parties – what occurs also elsewhere – and by religious leaders acting as political parties – what is, instead, typically “Italian” –. The combination of these two powers, the massive veto power the Vatican still has on the Italian society, and the strong commitment of conservative politicians to follow its recommendations, make it much more difficult to find agreements in a reasonable time.