VATICAN CITY, JULY 31, 2003 (Zenit.org).- What is the novelty in the document published on Thursday by the Holy See on the legal recognition of homosexual unions?
Monsignor Luño, assigned by the Holy See to comment on the text presented to the press explained to ZENIT: “It touches a new aspect, which is that of political ethics; it is not concerned with personal ethics, analyzed previously in other documents.” The document is not about any type of discrimination, the monsignor explained.
The purpose of the document, entitled “Considerations Regarding Plans for the Legal Recognition of Unions Between Homosexual Persons,” is to “show that there are comprehensible, rational, biological, social, and juridical reasons which support the teaching of the Church in its opposition to the equating of homosexual unions with matrimony,” Monsignor Luño clarified.
The monsignor, a philosopher and professor of Moral Theology at Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, said that “the problem of equating homosexual unions with matrimony is that matrimony would be redefined, changed.”
“In no case is it about discrimination of homosexual persons, but of guaranteeing the right action of the State in this concrete area,” he told ZENIT.
“The tone of the document, in line with the “Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life (January 2003) is one of clarification and explanation: reasons are given in a clear way so that it is understood that they are comprehensible and reasoned,” the monsignor added.
“To shed light on the ethical-political problems that homosexual unions pose to lawmakers and persons in power in different parts of the world” is, therefore, the objective of the text, directed to both Catholics and non-Catholics, he said.
Monsignor Luño’s note, published by the Holy See’ Press Office when issuing the document, reminds his audience that “all the great cultures of the world have given matrimony and the family specific institutional recognition.”
For this Consultor of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “the public importance of matrimony is not based on the fact of being any form at all of institutionalized friendship or human communication, but of its condition as a stable state in life that carries out an essential and multifarious function in favor of the common good: order of the generations, survival of society, education and socialization of children.”
From this perspective, “the supposed comparison or assimilation between homosexual unions and matrimony is manifestly unfounded,” the expert in morality concluded.
