Vatican condemns Spain's gay marriage right as a 'sad step'

The Vatican’s top official for family issues has condemned as a “sad step” the Spanish government’s proposal to allow homosexuals to marry and to adopt children.

The remarks on Vatican Radio by Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, kept up Pope John Paul II’s campaign against gay marriage.

“With this proposed law, nothing is left in the definition of marriage,” the cardinal said. “They invent a new definition, implicitly an alternative to marriage.”

Referring to nations in Europe that have already legalised gay marriage, the Vatican official said: “They present it as if it were a conquest of modernity and of democracy, but really they are falling into deep dehumanisation.”