Vatican: Gay Unions 'Deplorable'

The Vatican has blasted lawmakers for giving legal recognition to so-called "de facto" unions — including those between homosexuals — and said attempts to allow adoption by gays were "a great danger."

A 77-page document released Tuesday by The Pontifical Council for the Family was built heavily around similar denunciations over the last few years by Pope John Paul II.

Italian gay groups, stung over the summer by the Vatican's moves to try to block gay pride events in Rome, denounced the latest pronouncement on homosexual unions.

"God's plan has nothing to do with the lay state," said Franco Grillini, a former president of the gay-rights organization Arcigay.

The Vatican's council on family matters also presented a proposal to make sex crimes against children, including "sex tourism" exploitation, crimes against humanity.

But the bulk of the positions presented Tuesday hammered away at unions between gays as well as legal recognition for unmarried heterosexual couples.

The Catholic Church teaches that while homosexual relations are not sinful, homosexual acts are.

While not citing any particular country, the Vatican spoke of "great concern" about lawmakers' efforts "in many countries with an ancient Christian tradition" to give legal status to unmarried couples.

"In today's open and democratic societies, the state and the public authorities must not institutionalize de facto unions, thereby giving them a status similar to marriage and the family, nor much less make them equivalent to the family based on marriage," it said.

De facto unions "should remain on the private level," the Vatican said. It described as a "serious sign of the contemporary breakdown in the social and moral conscience" political efforts to give institutional status to de facto couples.

Saying de facto unions often characterized "a strong assertion not to take on any ties" and a "conception of love detached from any responsibility," the document called them inherently unstable.

The document reserved its most forceful language for the controversial issue of gay couples, saying: "Marriage cannot be reduced to a condition similar to that of a homosexual relationship. This is contrary to common sense."

"De facto unions between homosexuals are a deplorable distortion of what should be a communion of love and life between a man and a woman in a reciprocal gift open to life," it said.

It said attempts to legalize the adoption of children by homosexual couples added "an element of great danger."

The Vatican's pronouncement comes amid signs of growing — but still controversial — acceptance of gay unions.

Earlier this month, Germany granted legal recognition to gay couples, following similar moves over the last decade by other Western European countries. Christian Demorats there have vowed to block the law.

The Canadian government this year overhauled 68 federal statutes to erase most legal differences between heterosexual and homosexual couples.

In September, the Netherlands, long in the vanguard on gay rights, enacted a bill converting the country's "registered same-sex partnerships" into full-fledged marriages, complete with divorce guidelines and wider adoption rights for gays.

In July, Vermont became the first U.S. state to recognize gay unions. The Presbyterian Church in the United States is divided over whether ministers should bless homosexual unions.