“Recent legislative measures adopted in the country have recklessly jeopardized family life”, charged Bishop Philip Tartaglia of Edinburgh. In a homily pronounced in St. Mary’s Cathedral on Sunday 8 October, during the annual “Red Mass” that inaugurates the legal year, the bishop, addressing his remarks to the members of the legal profession present, advocates and judges of Scotland’s Supreme Court, exhorted them to let themselves be guided “by their Catholic principles and conscience” and use “their influence to bring to the attention of legislators and of all citizens the value of public funding for programmes of marriage preparation and marriage counselling” with the aim of “safeguarding and preserving the marriage bond”. “The family, constituted by parents, a man and a woman united in matrimony, and by their offspring, has been the basic cell of society in pre-Christian, Christian and non-Christian cultures for millennia. Until now”, remarked the bishop, recalling “the raft of legislative provisions” that “here in Scotland as elsewhere has recklessly jeopardized family life as intended by God’s purpose”. The bishop’s remarks were directed in particular against three new laws: the “Family Law Act” which, he explained, “makes divorce even quicker and gives quasi-marital status to de facto homosexual unions”, the “Civil Partnership legislation”, which “allows homosexual couples to register their relationships and to enjoy a civil status analogous to marriage”, and the “Gender Recognition Act” which “allows people to choose to be male or female irrespective of their sex”. All these are measures on which Bishop Tartaglia invites Catholic law professionals to reflect “according to conscience”. Catholic lawyers – he continued – in their dealings with politicians, legislators and civic leaders, should not hesitate to defend the sanctity of marriage and to underline the nefarious consequences of a divorce mentality on the common good of society”.
