Müller says Irish vote discriminates against family

Last month’s Irish referendum vote in favour of gay marriage discriminates against “marriage between a man and a woman and therefore also against the family”, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said.

In a long interview of 5 June with the Tagespost daily, Cardinal Gerhard Müller said he fully agreed with Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, that the vote in favour of the legalisation of gay marriage in Ireland was a “defeat for humanity”.

Linking same-sex marriage to the ending of discrimination against homosexuals was a way “naive people allowed their consciences to be lulled to sleep”, he said. There was a definite danger that the word “marriage” would become “an empty shell which one can fill with anything one wants to”, he warned. Marriage as a bond between a man and a woman had already been laid down in Creation, he recalled and explained that in his encyclical Laudato si, due to be published on Thursday, the Pope would not only be discussing environmental questions, but the topic of Creation as a whole. Church blessings for same-sex couples, the cardinal added, were a “blatant contradiction of the Word of God”.

South Australian Bishop Gregory O’Kelly warned that children of gay couples who have been denied the right to a mother and a father may come to see themselves as akin to the “Stolen Generations” of Aboriginal children. Bishop O’Kelly, a Jesuit, wrote a letter “Concerning Gay Marriage and Children” to the people of his vast Diocese of Port Pirie on 26 May arguing that part of the success of the “yes” campaign in Ireland’s referendum on same-sex marriage had been due to a shift in the debate from the nature of marriage to focusing on the concept of equality.

“Not to be in favour of the vote was interpreted as being for discrimination and inequality among people,” he wrote. “Easy divorce, abortion, euthanasia, and now a radical reinterpretation of marriage, have all ... weakened our hold on the sacredness of life.”