We need to stand up to this: AME
Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell and senior Catholic bishops have called on parishioners across the country to defend the church’s stance on marriage this Sunday.
The Catholic Weekly reported the Sydney Archdiocese has sent a letter to all parishioners to be received on Sunday.
“Marriage is more than having one’s love for another legally recognised,” the letter reportedly read.
“It has been protected and supported by the law because governments have recognised its contribution to the good of society.
“The family based on strong, happy marriages plays a unique role in generating children and providing the best environment in which children can be nurtured and educated.
“It helps to ensure the future and wellbeing of society.”
Bishops Julian Porteous, Terry Brady and Peter Comensoli are also signatories to the letter.
Bishop Porteous told The Catholic Weekly he hoped parish priests would read the letter at services on Sunday.
In a statement, Australian Marriage Equality national convener Alex Greenwich said marriage equality supporters needed to stand up to the move.
“We can’t let the gains we have made together be compromised by this kind of fear campaign,” he said.
“We must ensure decision-makers in Canberra are not influenced by a campaign that misrepresents the views of a majority of Christians.”
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Same sex relationships were the norm in ancient times before Christianity.
Now we all controlled by religion and it’s beliefs and have been for more than two thousand years.
They are the ones that told us Marriage between a man and woman is normal, and we just accepted it, as fact.
Now we are challenging the status quo and all religions are fighting their right to still have control over society and everything that life brings.
We must severe the ties of Church and state, once and for all.
YAWN
religion… and its poor brainwashed followers are SOOOOOOOOOOO 1940s
Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox, Salvos: these organisations are funded by vast amounts of taxpayer money – i.e., your and mine – through discriminatory ‘services’ they run and through generous tax exemptions. You want to fight them, fight to shut off the tax exemptions, make them obey the anti-discrimination laws same as anyone else. I don’t want my taxes spent on propping up myth, discrimination and prejudice.
If the churches are entering the political arena with this pathetic pitch-fork and fire mentality, then TAX THE GODDAMNED MOTHERF*CKERS!!
aRGHGHGHH!!!
Since when do the church “own” marriage?
A truly awful paper.
David, I’ve something beter. My T-shirt reading, “Gay Marriage is Sacred”. No need to go to church. Just wear it around town!
How about going to a catholic church on Sunday and boo-ing if it is read and walking out.
Cardinal Pell, there is no doubt that sexual guilt is the Roman Catholic Church’s greatest achievement.
You may have seen a report in the Melbourne Herald of 4 October where a Father Terence Tanner, who runs a drug rehabilitation scheme in London, revealed that ‘disproportionately high number of drug users, alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, prostitutes, night club strippers, and convicted prisoners in Britain are Roman Catholics’. Father Tanner drew attention to the fact that, although only about one in eleven people in Britain is Roman Catholic, 11,000 if the 44,000 people in prisons come from a Catholic background.
You can only imagine that similar figures.
Over the years researched documentaries on subjects like prostitution observed a similar pattern in Australia.
Certainly the Department of Community Welfare Services annual report, tabled in the Victorian Parliament some years ago, shows that 40.3 per cent of Victoria’s prisoners are Catholics.
That is enough evidence to warn parents against sending their innocent children to Catholics schools.
When will these losers realise that they have riped of the parishioners for centuries to afford extravagant lifestyles, and NEVER given a hoot about how the people managed to pay their tithes.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Sisters and brothers talk to each other, the people who live a real life not some “celebate”, existence so as not to be competent to tell people how to live.
It is time the 30% stopped having 70% of the say in hat we do in our daily lives, relationships and bedrooms. Tales of which they can only dream, or is there a guilt they are unwilling to face?
It’s good that the LGBT community has found out about this letter that is to go out on Sunday. Gay Christians especially can make their views known over the weekend and gay Catholics can speak to their fellow parishioners to let them know that this letter is referring to real people and real lives; that it’s not just theoretical. In the end I suspect (and hope) that, with the standing of Cardinal Pell already quite low in the Australian imagination (he is a bit of dinosaur even in his own chruch), this top-down heavy-handed approach by an out-of-touch Catholic hierarchy will actuaolly have a reverse effect on the people it is trying to persuade. When the Victoiran bishops tried this on recently, it backfired by reminding people how just out-of-touch these bishops really are and a grass-roots campaign for sensible thinking ensued and won huge ground. In the twenty first century, people don’t want to be told what to think, how to think, or how to have faith by some remote monarchical cardinal and his yes-men bishops. Catholics these days are more sophisticated and with the primacy of conscience firmly in place in the Catholic imagination can make up their own minds about gay people and whether marriage really is about children, as His Eminence would have us all believe. It is an old-world pre-Vatican II declaration to the failthful as to what is orthodox. Catholics rightly have rebelled against this way of doing church a long time ago. Come on Catholics, be Christ-like. Reject this edict out of hand and continue to love your neighbour.
Suggestions for countering this?
Isn’t it amazing that the good old Catholic church does not send out a letter to all it’s parishioners to alert them to the dangers within the church such as peodapohile priests!! Religion has no right to make any comment on gay marriage! Stay out of our lives and we’ll stay out of yours!
Perhaps the Catholic Weakly should read a letter of apology to victims of their
right-wing hate mongering and abuse!
Fair dinkim! These loons still worship the Pope with his lovely hand-made red prada shoes!