Though it’s a new year, the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper is up to its old tricks.
In a front-page editorial in L’Osservatore Romano, historian Lucetta Scaraffia compared the idea of gay marriage to that of an “egalitarian utopia that did so much damage during the 20th century…deceiving humanity as socialism did in the past.”
According to The State Journal-Register, Scaraffia is a 64-year-old former feminist activist cum zealous Catholic who gets her jollies regularly slamming marriage equality for L’Osservatore.
Equating traditional marriage to the union between same-sex couples, Scaraffia wrote, is a “negation of truth,” which would undermine “one of the basic structures of human society, family.”
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She concluded by warning that society will end up paying “a very high price” for destroying family, “as it happened in the past with the attempts to create a complete social and economical equality.”
Just last month, that same paper published similar sentiments, criticizing marriage equality as an “unattainable utopia.” Pope Benedict XVI has also been on a roll as of late, condemning gay marriage as the downfall of society and all that holy jazz.
Meanwhile, Scaraffia defended her point of view in a recent interview, claiming that the church’s defense of traditional marriage is not discrimination.
“The Vatican has often intervened against discrimination for gay people,” she said “But many people don’t want to see it, they just want to pin it down as homophobic.”
We’d like to see that, but it’s hard to see something that doesn’t exist.
Scott Rose
At the link below is the full text of the “Reichskonkordat,” the political treaty between the Vatican and Adolf Hitler. At the time this treaty was signed, the anti-Jewish racial laws were already in force in Nazi Germany:
Here is an example of what is in the treaty:
Article 3
In order to foster good relations between the Holy See and the German Reich, an apostolic nuncio will reside in the capital of the German Reich and an ambassador of the German Reich at the Holy See.
http://www.concordatwatch.eu/showkb.php?org_id=858&kb_header_id=752&kb_id=1211
We need clarity in public understanding of the criminal Catholic Church’s motivations. Worldwide, the Church still has a business plan of stigmatizing gays and lesbians in society, in order to get enough of them to sign up for lifetimes of near slave labor as low-level priests and nuns. That is how the rotting, corrupted turds at the top of the Church hierarchy continue to live off the fat of the land. Without that cheap labor from priests and nuns, the “leaders” could not live as they do; and they do continue to 1) encourage over-reproduction; and 2) stigmatize gays and lesbians, because those two things help them trap victims in lifetimes of near slave labor. Then we also need clarity of public understanding about what the Catholic Church did to homosexuals before and during the era of the Holocaust. There were as many gay victims of the Holocaust as there were, because of the Church’s involvement in demonizing them and getting them deported to concentration camps. All over Europe, you can find memorials to the gay victims — but the Catholic Church has never acknowledged its role in getting those gay victims sent to their deaths. We must better organize, to get the rest of society to demand along with us, that the Church acknowledge its role in getting gay Holocaust victims murdered. How these shitheads at the top of the Church hierarchy have the nerve to continue demonizing gay people is beyond me.
Cam
It’s funny that a place ruled by an athoritarian regime with one dictator with absolute power at the helm would compare anything gay to a form of govt.
2eo
Is it okay to directly call the pope a paedophile yet?
Or are we still bound by some ridiculous rule that means I have to respect the bullshit he and his underlings speak every hour of every single day?
2eo
@Scott Rose: christianity and the catholic church in particular are still funding mass murder and genocide, the only thing that has changed is the year and continent.
Randal Oulton
The sad thing is that while Rome opposed totalitarianism in the form of Communism in eastern Europe, it supported it in the form of brutal dictatorships in South and Central America, and in Africa. One form of totalitarianism was considered bad for the Vatican’s exercise of power, the other was seen as good. Disregard any of her reasoning about principles — it’s no more complicated than that. The principle was what is best for the *Vatican*, even if millions had to suffer under brutal regimes. The same principle was used by Catholic churches in Germany when they willingly handed over all their parish records to the Nazis to make it easier for them to detect any Jewishness in someone’s family tree. It was best for the Church to be seen as being helpful.
2eo
@Randal Oulton: Also the latent pathological hatred of jewish people that permeated the christian faith in ALL of its main sects, lets not forget that. Collaborating and actively working with the SS whose motto let us remember was.
Gott Mit Uns
Literal translation of “god with us”.
Joetx
@Cam: You beat me to it. Catholic parishioners aren’t allowed to vote for their leaders, either at the local level (parish & diocese), let alone at the macro level (the Vatican). The pope thinks he’s infallible.
Hmm, sounds like fascism to me.
BTW, cradle Catholic here.
Joetx
@Randal Oulton: Sadly, most people, including most Catholics, have no idea of the Vatican’s support for authoritarian regimes in the Americas.
And the way John Paul 2, supposedly the nice, grandfatherly pope, destroyed liberation theology, which is Christ’s teachings in action & was especially important in the Americas, shows you where the Vatican’s priorities lie. They’re certainly not for the betterment of humanity.
gaym50ish
I loved Neil Steinberg’s response to Cardinal George in the Chicago Sun-Times. The cardinal wrote to his parishioners that he was “worried” that his opposition to gay marriage would cause people to call him a bigot. Steinberg wrote: “You worry, in your letters, not about the families you would blithely squelch, but about your own feelings, the risk that devout Catholics will be seen as ‘the equivalent of bigots’ after gay marriage becomes completely accepted — which it certainly will.
Well, yeah, that’s the drawback of being a bigot, no matter how you gild it in theology. But worry not — look at the church’s stance on females. While society long ago let them be doctors and lawyers and, yes, even clergy, the church refuses to follow suit. Yet it lives with the anti-women stigma just fine. It’ll be no different with gays, and the church’s position will be just one more antiquated cruelty the world will tolerate. You’ll hardly notice.”
Steinberg concluded with this criticism: “Rather than try to make life better for gays — a long-oppressed group only now achieving freedoms most take for granted — you choose to set your faith as a stumbling block before them. Rather than help the more hidebound members of your church see why this is rightly happening now, you vigorously rally them to desperate, last-ditch resistance.”