"Welcoming everyone with kindness and sympathy, as most priests do, is one thing; creating a 'marital' institution that suits their particular situation is another." Msgr. Tony Anatrella said this in an interview with Zenit about Ireland's recent vote in favor of same-sex unions. He pointed out that, far from being "stunted," the Catholic position is "prophetic." Psychoanalyst and specialist in Social Psychiatry, Msgr. Anatrella is consultant to the Pontifical Council for the Family and the Pontifical Council for Health.
The Irish vote, he explains, is "a defeat for the family and the meaning of marriage, which is expressed in the alliance of the sexes, an institution that does not apply to those who have an attraction to people of the same sex. This alters the alliance, because marriage is a secular institution created with reference to the sexual difference. What has been done is a theft of words and symbols applied to two persons who are of the same sex and, consequently, outside the logic of the marital alliance."
In the light of such a thing, civil law loses its strength, because it says a lot "about the state of Western democracies, which also claim to give lessons to the rest of the world and ideologically colonize the mind with a paradigm shift. We want to redefine the couple, marriage, and the family by starting with sexual orientations (that are simply desires) to the detriment of the two sexual identities of men and women. We are facing—he continued—a decline in emotional life, if we organize society on the basis of sexual orientation instead of starting with the only two sexual identities that exist: the masculine and the feminine." Everything else, indiscriminately interpreted as homophobic, "prevents us from thinking about making the necessary distinctions."
Read the entire interview
