In his weekly letter, Archbishop Agustin Garcia-Gasco of Valencia, Spain, decried the “controlled demolition of marriage from within by the laws reforming the Civil Code,” and he warned that “the State has no right to demolish marriage from within.”

Referring to the law allowing gay “marriage” and “express divorce,” the archbishop called it “an atrocity” and noted that “time will lay bear the primary and the secondary effects of this rash and unjust decision.”

In his letter, the archbishop recalled that marriage “is a relationship between one man and one woman that merits the recognition and appreciation of all societies, for the survival of the human race depends on it”.

“If everything is marriage, nothing is marriage,” he noted, adding that “changing the structure of marriage and at the same time opening it up to everyone is a contradictory slight-of-hand that destroys this institution.”

The archbishop also denounced the “grave restricting of freedoms” posed by the existence of certain groups that have been awaiting such reforms in order to “prohibit speaking of marriage as a union between a man and a woman and in order to characterize as ‘homophobic’ anyone who speaks of marriage in these terms.”