Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, urged Americans to pray that the Supreme Court "will recognize that they have no business redefining marriage" in rendering a decision in the upcoming same-sex "marriage" case.
The High Court will hear arguments in the case on Tuesday.
In an interview during Saturday's "March for Marriage" in Washington,
Lori told CNS News that if marriage were to be redefined by court fiat it would "raise enormous religious freedom issues."
Lori said Catholics could never accept the notion that marriage could involve anything other than a relationship between one man and one woman.
"We really believe deeply that this is how God created us, this is the way things are, and this is the way things are meant to be," he said.
"We would not ever countenance discrimination against people who are of a same-sex attraction," Lori said. But "marriage is marriage and it has a lot to do with the love of one man and one woman."
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has an
extensive library of documents explaining Church doctrine on topics including marriage and homosexuality.
Homosexuality, it states at one point, "has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained."
But while the church believes homosexuality's origins in the human psyche remain a mystery, Catholic doctrine emphasizes that gay practices cannot possibly be made acceptable to adherents of the faith:
"Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.' They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved."
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