The pope pressed his opposition to gay marriage Friday, denouncing what he described as people manipulating their God-given identities to suit their sexual choices — and destroying the very “essence of the human creature” in the process.
Benedict XVI made the comments in his annual Christmas address to the Vatican bureaucracy, one of his most important speeches of the year.
He dedicated it this year to promoting traditional family values in the face of vocal campaigns in France, the United States, Britain and elsewhere to legalize same-sex marriage.
In his remarks, Benedict quoted the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, in saying the campaign for granting gays the right to marry and adopt children was an “attack” on the traditional family made up of a father, mother and children.
“People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being,” he said.
“They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”
“The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned,” he said.
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