Only Between a Man
and a Woman?
I
n recent decades, there has been a consistent
effort to legalize same-sex marriage. In 1994,
the European Parliament expressed favor toward
the idea, and more recently Ireland (via popular
vote) and the United States (through the
Supreme Court) have granted full legal status to
marriages between couples of the same sex.
The Catholic Church has consistently
opposed same-sex marriage because, according
to the divine and natural law, marriage can only
take place between one man and one woman. Pope Leo XIII,
in his 1880 encyclical Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae, made