inocente, I am well aware of the Pope’s latest release. I am also a scripture scholar, well acquainted with Protestant and Jewish scripture scholarship as well. The Catholic interpretation of scripture is holistic, as is her theology. The Pope does not mean “rights” in the casual, frankly sloppy, way that 21st century Americans with no legal background throw that term around reactively to apply to every personal goal imaginable. When he, and any Pope, talks and has talked about natural rights, the context is what is known in Catholicism as Natural Law. Just understand that it is not only Catholics who have adopted natural law as a guiding philosophy. From time to time it can be found in various Western documents, especially legal ones.
I cannot give you an adequate course in the foundations of Catholic theology and philosophy on a discussion board intended for hundreds of other contributors as well. If you want to truly understand the basis for her positions on anything, there’s a ton of reading out there. Much of it pops up on the right and left hand navigations windows when you visit this forum. It’s especially, as you can see, important to understand the terminology, because without a context for the terms, it is easy to misinterpret.
If I wanted to really understand why Religion X had a particular stand on a modern issue, I would not only do some essential reading on what makes the religion tick, so to speak, I would “hang out” on communication venues where a lot of them hang out. Thus, I understand why you’re hanging out on CAF to get an answer to this, but sometimes a very effiicent way to p(name removed by moderator)oint an area of confusion is to listen to something more active. The subject comes up frequently on EWTN radio. I don’t know where you’re located or if you have a local feed, but the EWTN website might have a list of those feeds, and if you have no local feed, there are podcasts of shows. Catholic Answers Live, hosted by Patrick Coffin, often discusses contemporary issues such as this one. It’s a call-in show but he has always has guests, some of them on the staff of ewtn, others from the broader Catholic community. Also Colin Donovan has a weekly (Friday) shows which broadcasts at 3 p.m. Eastern. He’s the VP for moral theolgy at EWTN, and he is particularly good at laying the logical foundation for answers to moral questions callers raise. I’m not trying to blow you off; I’m suggesting that it’s sometimes easier to identify the reasoning behind these issues in a brief format. Typically a caller will ask, “How do I answer my sister-in-law who is telling her kids that gays should have the ‘right’ to marry”?
The short answer is that the secular world considers the expression of homosexuality to be equal with heterosexuality. That is directly opposed to the Catholic view, which assumes not just the biblical proscription against it (OT and NT and specifically, btw, the Judaism which Jesus subscribed to, which forbade the expression of it), but more positively the affirmation of complementarity in man + woman, their union with each other being an image of God’s very love and an affirmation of his creation and the order of his creation, which we are bound to revere in action, not just in thought & prayer. Thus, the Church accepts that union of man + woman is sacred and ordered to the continuance of God’s creation, whereas the union of man + man or woman + woman contradicts that and offends that and is a sacrilege against that. And that view is absolute, not relative or subject to change with changing fads and secular philosophies and politics and the manipulation of reality, let alone anatomy.
Note that Benedict XVI makes reference to that here:
Fidelity to God’s word leads us to point out that nowadays this institution [the sacrament of marriage] is in many ways under attack from the current mentality.In the face of widespread confusion in the sphere of affectivity, and ***the rise of ways of thinking which trivialize the human body and sexual differentiation, the word of God re-affirms the original goodness of the human being, created as man and woman ***and called to a love which is faithful, reciprocal and fruitful.
Part 2 of the short answer is that love of neighbor includes correction of neighbor and, when not correctable, refusal to approve of neighbor’s errant ways, and refusal to subvert the divine order of creation I made reference to. For Catholics to support gay marriage in word or deed is to contribute to the subversion of the divine order, which is considered a grave offense against God, much more serious than any ‘un-neighborly’ politely refusing to attend the gay marriage of an acquaintance, for example, or not supporting a ballot measure to approve of it in a particular state. Be careful of taking Jesus’ words out of context. Notice he never said, “Love your neighbor even when it means opposing the fundamental underpinnings of Torah, universally applied to all Jews.” Love is not moral permission for immoral acts. He never said or implied that it was. He said that on a case by case basis, technical regulations regarding Shabbat, for example, should be overriden by a neighbor’s timely need which could not wait, nor should, for the sun to set.
