Vatican defiant in face of marriage equality wins | Gay Star News
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Vatican defiant in face of marriage equality wins
The Vatican newspaper has denied that the church is losing the fight on same-sex marriage and has warned US President Barack Obama about moving too fast on social issues
10 November 2012 | By Andrew Potts
Vatican City
Photo: Enrique Cornejo
The newspaper of the Holy See in Rome has denied that the Catholic Church is losing the fight on same-sex marriage despite recent gains in the US and France following national elections.
In an article in L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican journalist and historian Lucetta Scaraffia wrote that the Catholic Church was the only institution at a global level that was capable of resisting those that would ‘break up … human society’ following the US election.
‘You could say that the church, on this level, is bound to lose,’ Scaraffia wrote, ‘But this is not the case.’
Scaraffia wrote that the Church’s opposition to allowing same-sex couples to adopt in the UK and against government mandated access to birth control in the US had shown the world that ‘this is not about [fighting] progress.’
Instead Scaraffia claimed that the Catholic Church was fighting against ‘the loss of one of the founding freedoms of the modern state - religious liberty.’
Scaraffia is the first female writer to be allowed to contribute to L’Osservatore Romano in the newspaper’s 151 year history.
A November 8 editorial in L’Osservatore Romano also warned of a religious backlash against the second Obama Administration if it tried to move too far on social issues.
‘The United States chose to place their trust in the current president, guaranteeing him a second term,’ the editorial reads.
‘But if Obama wants to be the president of all American people, he must eventually acknowledge the requests that are rising with strength from the religious communities - the Catholic Church being the first in line - in favour of the family, life and religious liberty.’
A complaint has been made to the US Internal Revenue Service after it was suggested that efforts by several prominent Catholic bishops to tell parishioners how to vote may have broken the laws governing the church’s tax free status in the US.