Recently, Guido Westerwelle, the German Foreign Minister, who has a male partner, was in Malta on a short official visit. Thankfully we were not asked to host his partner too.
At around the same time, the weekly English edition of L’Osservatore Romano carried an address by Pope Benedict XVI to the new Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany, titled ‘The Church cannot approve alternative models of the family’.
The Pope did not mince his words, and among others mentioned several German heroes who in Nazi Germany stood up to the regime’s ideology (an ideology in a state which wanted to impose itself as the religion of the people and in which homosexuality among its top leaders was not rare).
Benedict XVI said: “The Church sees with concern the growing endeavour to eliminate the Christian concept of marriage and family from society’s conscience. Marriage is manifested as a lasting union of love between a man and a woman, which also always aspires to the transmission of life.
“One of its conditions is the willingness of the spouses to refer to each other forever. This requires a certain maturity of the person and a fundamental existential and social attitude: a ‘culture of the person’, as ...John Paul II once said... In the preparation and guidance of the married couples it is necessary to create the basic conditions to sustain and develop this culture.
“At the same time, we must be aware that the success of marriages depends on all of us and on the personal culture of each individual citizen. In this regard, the Church cannot approve legislative initiatives that entail a re-evaluation of alternative models to married and family life.”
Benedict XVI clarified that these ‘alternative’ models of the family “contribute to weakening the principles of natural law and hence to the relativisation of all legislation, as well as to the confusion about values in society.”
A strong argument expounded by the Pope is that “it is a principle... that the human being should be protected precisely in situations of weakness; the human person always takes priority over other aims”.
I find it surprising that while on one hand the Church is being vilified because a very small number of priests abused their position of trust, not openly but secretly, at the same time some of the accusers do not hold back from scandalising whole societies by flaunting their homosexuality as if such actions do not harm those below the age of consent.