Bishops to debate same-sex unions

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops will debate a document today that opposes same-sex unions and exhorts state governments to recognize only marriages between men and women.

Also, America’s 65 million Catholics will experience more pain and embarrassment in coming months when a flood of details is released about a clergy sex-abuse crisis that has engulfed the denomination, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said yesterday.

The marriage document, called “Between Man and Woman: Questions and Answers About Marriage and Same-Sex Unions,” was released yesterday and defines marriage as a “lifelong union of a man and a woman.”

The document says that approving same-sex unions “contradicts the nature of marriage,” adding that, “It is not based on the natural complementarity of male and female. It cannot cooperate with God to create new life.”

It also says that recognizing homosexual “marriage” would “grant official public approval to homosexual activity and would treat it as if it were morally neutral.”

“I think when the American family is in trouble, the church is in trouble,” Bishop Donald Trautman of the Diocese of Erie, Pa., told the Associated Press. Bishop Trautman was on the committee of bishops that crafted the booklet.

The document is intended to give Catholics “a way to think about and articulate what may be their deep, yet unspoken conviction about what is true,” according to a statement by Bishop J. Kevin Boland of Savannah, Ga.

Most Americans are leery about embracing homosexual “marriage,” he said, but many are ambivalent about why marriage should be only between a man and a woman and thus protected by law.

The draft, which will be debated by bishops today, got a few early criticisms.

“Is there any reason why we’re not saying in this document that [homosexual acts are] a sin?” asked Auxiliary Miami Bishop Thomas G. Wenski. “Isn’t that our teaching?”

The bishops are expected to decide whether to approve the document later in their national meeting, which ends tomorrow. Nearly one out of four Americans is Roman Catholic.

The USCCB also will hear an update from the National Review Board, a lay watchdog panel that was appointed last year to monitor the progress that dioceses are making toward protecting children in the wake of the clergy sex-abuse scandal.

“It will be hard for people to hear the aggregate numbers [about abuse] over the past 50 years,” said the Most Rev. Wilton Gregory, president of the USCCB. “It will add some more pain to an already painful moment in the history of our church.”

Gathering at the Hyatt Regency in the District for their annual policy meeting, 296 bishops spent more than two hours in executive session about the denomination’s multimillion-dollar investigation into the crisis.

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