Posted on: Saturday, August 30, 2003

Anti-gay marriage effort to intensify

By Richard N. Ostling
Associated Press

NEW YORK — The Roman Catholic Church will step up its efforts to prevent legalization of same-sex marriage, the president of the nation's Catholic bishops said yesterday.

Bishop Wilton D. Gregory said the bishops could endorse a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as only heterosexual, though he stopped short of making such an endorsement himself.

Gregory, of Belleville, Ill., said the church is seeking "the best, most effective and surest means" for protecting marriage. "At this point, everything is on the table," he said.

The Vatican denounced same-sex marriages in a July doctrinal decree, while Canada's government is working to legalize them and some providences already have — moves that Gregory said "brought this close to us."

Some Republicans in Congress are calling for a constitutional ban on gay marriages nationwide. President Bush has not endorsed that proposal but has said marriage is between a man and a woman, and "we ought to codify that one way or the other."

Gregory said, "We believe the government has an obligation to protect marriage as an institution," and U.S. Catholic leaders will cooperate with "others who are similarly concerned with preserving the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious understanding of marriage in society."

In a wide-ranging interview, Gregory also opposed any reconsideration of the church's requirement of priestly celibacy, as was proposed in a petition to him from more than 160 Milwaukee priests this month. Priest organizations in Illinois, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania are considering similar petitions.

The current sexual-abuse crisis "is not a moment when the church needs to, or in fact intends to, review every one of our constitutive qualities and identities and beliefs and practices," Gregory said. "It's a moment of very intense feelings, raw feelings, but the whole store is not up for sale.

"I don't believe that there is any linkage between the abuse of children and celibacy," he added, because if that were so, sexual abuse within families would not be so widespread.

Gregory also reviewed implementation of the reform "charter" that the U.S. bishops issued last year to deal with the abuse scandal.

He said the process of "complying with the things we said we would do" is "on target" and that this is "a first and an important step, because it says to people what we must say, that your children will not knowingly ever be placed at risk in a church setting."

"But the issue of the restoration of confidence in our leadership" will take time, he said. "Trust is built slowly. It can be lost in the twinkling of an eye."

Under the charter, three reports are due around the end of this year.

One is a statistical study of the extent and patterns of priestly abuse cases, compiled by New York City's John Jay College of Criminal Justice from reports filed by each U.S. diocese.

Release of that study "will be a difficult moment" for the church, Gregory said, because of the impact of totaling up the numbers of accused priests and victims over the past 50 years. He said no other institution in society has ever done this.

The second document is an audit of whether each U.S. diocese is implementing the charter. That investigation, conducted largely by former FBI agents, is being supervised by the new Office of Child and Youth Protection, part of the U.S. bishops' national staff.

The third report, covering the past causes and context of the abuse crisis, is being developed by the National Review Board, an independent panel of lay Catholics.