Pope Benedict criticises gay culture

Pope Benedict XVI yesterday criticised gay culture and “what is put forward today under the term ‘gender’ as a new philosophy of sexuality”. According to it “sex is no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society”, he said.

People disputed “the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves,” he said.

He was speaking at the Vatican, where he received members of the curia and the governorate of the Vatican state for a traditional exchange of Christmas and new year greetings.

‘Essential’ duality

“Being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God,” he said. But “this very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed”.

“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 is concerned.”

If there was “no preordained duality of man and woman in creation then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation” and a child becomes “an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain”.

This “freedom to create oneself” means “necessarily the Maker Himself is denied” and man “is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God”.