Vatican says it hasn't lost the gay marriage fight

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Despite recent setbacks in the United States and Europe, the Catholic Church is not losing the fight on gay marriage, the Vatican semiofficial newspaper claimed on Friday (Nov. 9).

On the contrary, according to an article in L'Osservatore Romano by historian Lucetta Scaraffia, the church has emerged in recent years as the only institution on the global stage that's capable of resisting the forces that threaten to "break up ... human society."

Voters upheld gay marriage in referendums in four U.S. states, while the French government recently introduced legislation that will allow gay couples to marry and adopt children. Spain's Constitutional Court on Monday (Nov. 5) rejected a bid to repeal the country's 2005 gay marriage law.

"You could say that the church, on this level, is bound to lose," writes Scaraffia. "But this is not the case."

According to the historian, the church's fight on moral issues such as gay marriage and abortion has drawn support and "admiration" from many non-Catholics

By opposing legislation allowing gay couples to adopt in the United Kingdom or fighting the birth control mandate in the U.S., the church "made it clear for everyone that this is not about progress" but about "the loss of one of the founding freedoms of the modern State, religious liberty."

In fact, Scaraffia says that the church is "the only institution" that defends traditional family, "the foundation upon which all human societies have been built until today," from what she called a "politically correct ideology" supported, among others, by the United Nations.