The Catholic Archbishop of Cardiff, Peter Smith, has written to the British Minister for Communities and Local Government, Ruth Kelly, asking for a meeting to discuss the new legislation on homosexual unions. Archbishop Smith, who heads the Department for Christian Responsibility and Citizenship of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, intends, in this way, to communicate to the minister “the grave concern” of the Catholic Church, which “fears that its own agencies of adoption and assignment could be forced to close in the event of their refusing to accept gay couples” as adoptive couples. Last month the archbishop wrote to the Minister to ask for a derogation that would permit Catholic agencies to operate as they do at the present time, and continue considering heterosexual couples alone as adoptive couples. The new regulations were supposed to be introduced throughout the United Kingdom in October 2006, but the government delayed by six months their entry into force to examine the large number of protests it had received. In Northern Ireland the new legislation came into force this week, causing the protest of thousands of Christians. Lord Morrow, member of the Democratic Unionist Party, immediately asked the upper chamber of the British Parliament, the House of Lords, to annul it and over 2000 Christians signed a letter addressed to the Queen asking her to intervene with the Prime Minister to press for an amendment of the law, which the signatories of the letter call an affront to freedom of religion.
