A reader read this in another blog and asked us if it was true.
Favorable to homosexual couples, but with the appropriate distinctions. It is what the Bishop of Ragusa, Bp. Paolo Urso, confirms after his declarations appeared on the internet following an interview given to Quotidiano Nazionale and mentioned by the website [three-letter-word].it and by several online blogs. Urso explained that the Government must recognize this de facto situation, even if the union of [three-letter-word] couples should be called by a different name than "matrimony", because, he explains, "otherwise we will not understand each other".
He then adds, "A secular State, as ours, cannot ignore the phenomenon of partnerships, it must move forward and define rights and duties for the partners. The moral evaluation belongs to others." [Source: Ragusa News - Jan. 14 - in Italian; in the image, Bp. Urso in an ecumenical meeting.]
The matter has been so tiresomely explained by the Church... - for instance, in the 2003 Considerations regarding Proposals to give legal recognition to unions between homosexual persons, of the Congregation for the Doctrinal of the Faith. Just last week, by the way, in his yearly address to the ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, the Holy Father recalled that, "pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself." It is a matter that is thus not merely "moral" (as "morality" is understood by the Bishop, that is, as having no relevance to the State and to the Law), but that is not-negotiable even to politicians - much less to Bishops!
The crisis of leadership must end: it humiliates the faithful, it destroys morale, and it devastates the Church from the inside out and from the top down.
[Note: Paolo Urso was named bishop of Ragusa, Sicily, by Pope John Paul II in 2002.]
