Lisbon’s Patriarch-Cardinal renewed the Catholic Church in Portugal’s attack on homosexual marriage by stating that “it was solely for procreation”.
Dom José Policarpo said on Friday that the Church would “never accept” civil marriage between people of the same sex, arguing that the family is based on a “contract between a man and a woman”, which “leads to procreation”.
Dom José Policarpo chose St. Vincent’s Day, being one of the patron saints of Lisbon, to give a sermon in the patriarchal cathedral or Sé in which he declared, quoting a passage from the Old Testament, “the city will not be saved if the family is not saved”.
It was the Portuguese cardinal’s first public statement following the controversy surrounding civil same sex marriages, which were pushed through Parliament by the PS government with the help of the Bloco de Esquerda and PCP parties, earlier this month.
The Cardinal said that the law recently voted through Parliament “changed normal family dignity and contributed towards the weakening of the family community”.
Over the weekend, the President of Lisbon Câmara, António Costa, while stating opposition to the idea of sponsoring a gay couple in Lisbon’s traditional annual St. Anthony’s Day Weddings, where the Câmara foots the bill for between 16 and 26 couples, did not rule out creating an alternative St. Anthony’s Day scheme for same sex marriages.
Meanwhile, countering arguments from legal experts that the government’s failure to allow adoption by same sex couples could be illegal, discriminatory against human and civil rights and unconstitutional, the Beadle of the Order of Lawyers, António Marinho e Pinto, said last week that “not one right would be violated because the right to adoption is not enshrined in the Portuguese Constitution”.
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