Madrid, Spain, Jun 19, 2005 / 22:00 pm
In his weekly letter issued on the eve of the pro-family rallies that took place Saturday in Spain, Archbishop Agustin Garcia-Gasco of Valencia said, “Marriage is a natural reality, not a product of design,” and “families need just laws.”
The archbishop warned that the family “could suffer serious discrimination from confusing laws that do not recognize and that distort the essential elements of marriage” and he said, “promoting a change in the nature of marriage and the family is a fraud and an error that benefits nobody and harms the very foundations of society.”
In his letter, Archbishop Garcia-Gasco also called attention to “those who seem to be intent upon confusing the right to have a family with just another angle of the freedom of association.” The family, he noted, “is a natural reality that has its own intertwined purposes that it does not share with any other group.”
Referring to the complementarity of male and female sexuality, the archbishop emphasized that this “is a joyous difference willed by nature for the procreation of the species and the survival of society and of the human race.” The Church “recognizes this complementarity desired by God and raises it to the dignity of a sacrament,” he added.