Posted on 11/04/2012 12:08:07 PM PST by markomalley
France's governing Socialist Party hit back hard at the Roman Catholic Church on Sunday for campaigning against its plan to legalize same-sex marriage, heralding a bruising debate over the issue.
Paris Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois spoke against the proposed law on Saturday and encouraged Catholics to write to their elected officials and take to the streets in protest against the reform due to be voted on by mid-2013.
Opinion polls show that backing for the plan, a campaign promise by President Francois Hollande, has slipped several points since leaders of France's main religions began speaking out against it and now stands at just under 60 percent.
The government is due to present the draft text of the law to the cabinet on Wednesday.
"I'm shocked by this attitude which I think is a kind of return to a fundamentalism that I find problematic," Jean-Marie Le Guen, Socialist senator from Paris, said of Vingt-Trois's speech to bishops in the pilgrimage town of Lourdes.
Party spokesman David Assouline said it was not the Church's role "to oppose the will of the legislature, especially concerning civil marriage in a secular republic."
In his Lourdes speech, Vingt-Trois, who is head of the bishops' conference, said legalizing same-sex marriage would profoundly affect the equilibrium of French society and harm children who would grow up without a father and a mother.
"It will not be 'marriage for all'," he said, citing the slogan of campaign for gay matrimony, "it will be the marriage of a few imposed on all".
If the law passes, France - a traditionally Catholic society where churchgoers are now a single-digit minority - would become the 12th country in the world to allow same-sex marriage.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
God be with these French priests in power, who are surrounded by ravenous wolves, as Jesus was on His way to the Cross. Socialists have always paraded as right by might, despising the faith and always, always bent on the destruction of the great Church.
We here in the US have few bishops calling for much of anything more than the perfunctory, so it’s a certainty we shall be diminished also.
This will be our greatest Cross when it does come.
Hey Le Guen, if you think it’s “problematic” now, wait until you hear from the MUSLIMS/s
The Catholic church has seemingly never had a problem with supporting the power of the State when it comes to redistribution. I am unaware of a single prominent Catholic priest who opposed confiscation of property by the government at the point of a gun to fund “universal health care” (”for the poor”).
The Catholic church chose to lie down with rabid dogs. Now they are being bitten, not to mention the fleas.
Spain pulled this same stunt with Zapatero. The socialists run on expanding government and then immediately attack the social structure.
The Spanish protected:
It didn’t matter.
The French left has been anti-Church since the 1780s. The Church fought back until the 1940s.
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