During Mass on Friday 13 January, feast of the patron of Glasgow, St. Mungo, the archbishop of the city Mario Conti, primate of Scottish Catholics, asked the faithful to resist “the indirect attacks” being mounted on traditional values. “Today he said the attack is indirect on the moral order which is the heritage of all Christians and which preserves values shared by those who belong to other faiths”. What causes particular concern to the archbishop, and to all the other eights bishops of the Catholic Church in Scotland, at the present time is the recent legislation that gives the go ahead to civil partnerships between homosexual couples. “The bishops are concerned”, said Archbishop Conti, “by the way in which the institution of marriage is being threatened and by the way in which the family, which ought to be at the very centre of the concerns of the State, is being marginalized”. “The recent legislation on civil partnerships dangerously weakens the uniqueness of marriage as a social reality that is legally recognized, protected and privileged in terms of taxation. The law implicitly places homosexual acts on the same level as conjugal love. All this contradicts the Catholic view of sexuality and matrimony and arises from the fundamental error of separating the unitive and procreative aspects of conjugal love”.
