Pope calls for fight against gay marriage

The pope called for more opposition to laws he sees as threatening families based on traditional marriage today.

John Paul urged a vast mobilisation of the public worldwide to combat hunger and restated the Catholic church’s ban on embryo stem cell use.

The pontiff set out the Vatican’s priorities for 2005 in his traditional New Year’s address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See and representing 174 countries.

Speaking in French, John Paul delivered opening and closing remarks. He let an aide read the central portion of the speech.

To conserve strength, the pontiff frequently allows others to read his remarks.

Seated in a frescoed hall of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, John Paul, 84, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, looked alert.

He said his feeling of joy in offering New Year’s wishes to the ambassadors was tempered by the bad news from 2004, including the Indian Ocean devastation, the locusts plaguing north-west Africa, the Madrid train bombings, the Beslan school massacre, the “barbarous terrorism” in Iraq and the “inhuman violence” in Darfur.

John Paul asserted that the Church’s opposition, “supported by reason and science,” to abortion, assisted procreation and scientific research on human embryonic stem cells was clear.

In an obvious reference to laws in several countries or localities permitting marriage between homosexuals or equating the social rights of unwed couples to married ones, John Paul said that in some countries, the family’s “natural structure” is challenged.

Families, he said, “must necessarily be that of a union between a man and a woman founded on marriage.”

The world also needs to do something about malnutrition and hunger suffered by millions of people, the pontiff told the diplomats.

“An adequate response to this need, which is growing in scale and urgency, calls for a vast moral mobilisation of public opinionthe same applies all the more to political leaders, especially in those countries enjoying a sufficient or even prosperous standard of living,” the pontiff said.