Last Friday, Portugal’s parliament passed a bill legalising homosexual “marriage”.

Prime Minister Jose Socrates calls the bill “a step that will seem completely natural in the near future.”

What does the Portuguese Catholic Church say? (84 percent of Portugal’s people call themselves Catholic).

Hardly anything . . . according to the media, Cardinal Jose Policarpo, Archbishop of Lisbon, had made a “pact of silence“ with the government.

Before the parliamentary vote, Policarpo instructed Catholic parishes not to participate in a petition seeking a national referendum on the subject — which everybody knew would have resulted in a “NO” vote.

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Policarpo’s performance defies Catholic teaching as re-stated in the 1983 document “Considerations Regarding Proposals to give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons”, which said: “Legal recognition of homosexual unions, or placing them on the same level as marriage, would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour . . . but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity. The Church cannot fail to defend these values, for the good of men and women and for the good of society itself.”

Well said. Or perhaps not so well said?

This Catholic document, in over 2500 words, mentions God just 4 times. When the Church starts talking social-worker-lingo, compromise has already begun.  

“If you start talking their language, you soon start thinking their thoughts”, as Chairman Mao supposedly said in another context.

It’s a short step from giving the right answer in wrong, non-supernatural terms  to, 20-odd years later, getting the wrong answer in the devil’s own vocabulary, complete with phrases like “homophobia”, “taboos” etc., as enunciated by Cardinal Policarpo.

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Same-sex marriage is wrong because it’s against God’s will and laws. That is point one for the Church to assert. Discussing “human rights”, “values”, sociological outcomes etc., can come later.

Since the 1960s Second Vatican Council, the modernist Catholic Church has abandoned this principle.

Traditional Catholics pray for a U-turn back to God-centred Catholicism – starting from the top.

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