Pope's year-end address to curia: "Whoever defends God is defending man."

by Carl E. Olson on the CWR blog

If you've not read the entire address,
you'll want to. Below is the section about family, marriage, and
gender, a passage causing some hand-wringing among those who apparently
haven't figured out that (gasp!) the Pope and the Catholic Church does
and always will support and defend marriage as a life-long bond between a
man and a woman. The Telegraph, for example, has the headline, "Pope says future of mankind at stake over gay marriage",
and the subhead: "Pope Benedict XVI has weighed in on a heated debate
over gay marriage, criticising new concepts of the traditional family
and warning that mankind itself was at stake."



Of course, the
Holy Father never mentions "gay marriage", or even the word "marriage",
for his criticisms are aimed at something deeper and broader than the
frivilous narcissism and flawed understanding of equality found
throughout the "gay marriage" movement. They are focused on what might
be called a secularist form of neo-gnosticism, which seeks to remake
human nature according to the destructive whims and passions of the age.
"Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being,
no longer exist," Benedict XVI says about this anti-human approach, "Man
calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and
will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our
environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he
himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human
being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be." 

The
attacks on marriage throughout the West are serious and significant, but
are one big battle in an even bigger war, which is ultimately about God
himself, as the Pope makes clear.

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