Church in the World

Pope focuses on marriage and the family in key Christmas addresses

Robert Mickens - 3 January 2009

Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday threw his support behind a huge pro-family rally in Madrid in what was the latest in a recent series of widely reported comments he has made on traditional marriage and human sexuality. "Dear families, do not allow love, openness to life and the incomparable bonds that unite your families to become distorted," he said in Spanish during the midday Angelus from his window overlooking St Peter's Square at the Vatican. The message was broadcast live to Madrid where hundreds of thousands of Catholics joined Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela at an outdoor Mass. The purpose was to support traditional marriage in the face of the Socialist Government's liberal reforms, including legalised same-sex marriage, quicker divorces and easier abortions.

"The Pope is by your side," Benedict XVI told the Catholic Spaniards on the Feast of the Holy Family. Cardinal Rouco avoided criticising the Spanish Government at the Mass, following reports that Pope Benedict had asked the Spanish bishops to be less confrontational.

The Pope also urged Catholics at his Angelus to pray for the Fourth World Meeting of Families, which is to take place 14-18 January in Mexico City.

In contrast to other recent speeches on the family Pope Benedict made no allusion to same-sex unions. However, in a message on 18 December to Sweden's new ambassador to the Holy See, he insisted on the "fundamental importance for society of the institution of marriage, understood as a lifelong union between a man and a woman, open to the transmission of life". On the same day he told the new ambassador from Belize there were "growing threats to the institution of the family" that had to be thwarted by supporting traditional marriage. Then on 22 December, Pope Benedict made headlines around the world when in his  annual holiday address to members of the Roman Curia he offered a step-by-step explanation of the cosmos - and of human beings - as being created and ordered, with an "intelligent structure", by God.

"It is not outdated metaphysics if the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected," the Pope said.

He then went on to say that if people shunned this "language of creation" they would end up destroying themselves and the "very work of God". "That which is often expressed and understood as ‘gender' ultimately ends up in the self-emancipation of man from the created realm and the Creator," he said.

"The tropical forests merit, yes, our protection, but man as creature does not merit it any less," Pope Benedict insisted, before reaffirming the sanctity of marriage: "Great theologians of scholasticism defined matrimony, that is the lifelong union between a man and woman, as the sacrament of creation that the Creator himself instituted and which Christ - without modifying the message of Creation - then embraced in the history of his covenant with man." The Pope  said it was "in this perspective" that people needed to re-read the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. "The intention of Pope Paul VI," he said, "was to defend love against sexuality as consumption ... and the nature of man against its manipulation."