I listened to the entire speech and didn’t hear a single word about abortion or gay ‘marriage’. What speech was this reporter listening to?
What ... you didn't pick up on the "coded messages"???? /SARC
By the way I am going to read the text of the Pope's speech. It was difficult to understand him with his heavy accent.
The Golden Rule also reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development. . . .
. . . . I will end my visit to your country in Philadelphia, where I will take part in the World Meeting of Families. It is my wish that throughout my visit the family should be a recurrent theme. How essential the family has been to the building of this country! And how worthy it remains of our support and encouragement! Yet I cannot hide my concern for the family, which is threatened, perhaps as never before, from within and without. Fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family. I can only reiterate the importance and, above all, the richness and the beauty of family life.
In particular, I would like to call attention to those family members who are the most vulnerable, the young. For many of them, a future filled with countless possibilities beckons, yet so many others seem disoriented and aimless, trapped in a hopeless maze of violence, abuse and despair. Their problems are our problems. We cannot avoid them. We need to face them together, to talk about them and to seek effective solutions rather than getting bogged down in discussions. At the risk of oversimplifying, we might say that we live in a culture which pressures young people not to start a family, because they lack possibilities for the future. Yet this same culture presents others with so many options that they too are dissuaded from starting a family.
I think we all would've liked to have heard the pope tell Congress outright that PP is the work of Satan and that marriage is between one man and one woman. Maybe he doesn't think he needs to say it outright because there's no question where the Church stands on these issues.