"Marquette University, a 130 year-old Jesuit institution, has announced plans for the school to offer benefits to employees of same-sex couples effective next year.
School president Fr. Robert Wild made the announcement in a March 24 statement.
“Fr. Wild said the benefit provision was an expression of pastoral care and an acknowledgment that health care is a basic human right,” Kate Veene, the school's spokeswoman told EWTN News.
Fr. Wild said that offering same-sex couples medical, dental and vision benefits – currently provided to the university's married heterosexual couples and their dependents – was an issue he'd suffered internal conflict over.
He argued that gay couples “who have legally registered their commitment to each other” merit the same benefits as married couples under the Jesuit principle of “cura personalis” or “care for the whole person.”"
EWTN News
What is it with the Jesuits? If I were to have to choose which religious order is most likely to go off the reservation this would be the one.
Father Wild may have suffered all his internal conflict needlessly since the answer to his dilemma has already been provided by the Church, you know, that creaky old institution that he swore fealty to at one time?
The following excerpts come from a document released by the Vatican's Office for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2003 entitled "Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition To Unions Between Homosexual Persons":
The Church's teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world. Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose...
There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God's plan for marriage and family. Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law...
Where the government's policy is de facto tolerance and there is no explicit legal recognition of homosexual unions, it is necessary to distinguish carefully the various aspects of the problem. Moral conscience requires that, in every occasion, Christians give witness to the whole moral truth, which is contradicted both by approval of homosexual acts and unjust discrimination against homosexual persons...
In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection...
Every humanly-created law is legitimate insofar as it is consistent with the natural moral law, recognized by right reason, and insofar as it respects the inalienable rights of every person. Laws in favour of homosexual unions are contrary to right reason because they confer legal guarantees, analogous to those granted to marriage, to unions between persons of the same sex...
It might be asked how a law can be contrary to the common good if it does not impose any particular kind of behaviour, but simply gives legal recognition to a de facto reality which does not seem to cause injustice to anyone. In this area, one needs first to reflect on the difference between homosexual behaviour as a private phenomenon and the same behaviour as a relationship in society, foreseen and approved by the law, to the point where it becomes one of the institutions in the legal structure...
Homosexual unions are totally lacking in the biological and anthropological elements of marriage and family which would be the basis, on the level of reason, for granting them legal recognition. ..
Society owes its continued survival to the family, founded on marriage. The inevitable consequence of legal recognition of homosexual unions would be the redefinition of marriage, which would become, in its legal status, an institution devoid of essential reference to factors linked to heterosexuality; for example, procreation and raising children...
The principles of respect and non-discrimination cannot be invoked to support legal recognition of homosexual unions. Differentiating between persons or refusing social recognition or benefits is unacceptable only when it is contrary to justice. The denial of the social and legal status of marriage to forms of cohabitation that are not and cannot be marital is not opposed to justice; on the contrary, justice requires it.
Nor can the principle of the proper autonomy of the individual be reasonably invoked. It is one thing to maintain that individual citizens may freely engage in those activities that interest them and that this falls within the common civil right to freedom; it is something quite different to hold that activities which do not represent a significant or positive contribution to the development of the human person in society can receive specific and categorical legal recognition by the State...
Nor is the argument valid according to which legal recognition of homosexual unions is necessary to avoid situations in which cohabiting homosexual persons, simply because they live together, might be deprived of real recognition of their rights as persons and citizens. In reality, they can always make use of the provisions of law – like all citizens from the standpoint of their private autonomy – to protect their rights in matters of common interest. It would be gravely unjust to sacrifice the common good and just laws on the family in order to protect personal goods that can and must be guaranteed in ways that do not harm the body of society....
The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions. The common good requires that laws recognize, promote and protect marriage as the basis of the family, the primary unit of society. Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity. The Church cannot fail to defend these values, for the good of men and women and for the good of society itself.
So is Marquette following either the letter or spirit of Church teaching in granting homosexual couples the same rights regarding health insurance as it does married heterosexuals? According to the document above, a document approved by Pope John Paul II, it doesn't. And for Catholic it's important to note that when the Magisterium speaks in accord like this it means that what it is saying is for all intents and purposes infallible. Catholics, particularly priests, are not free to ignore these sorts of teachings. Regardless of the amount of internal conflict one involves himself in.
We are quickly moving towards a collapse of the Church here in America because not only does the laity refuse to follow Rome but it appears the prelates are refusing to do so, also.
What is truth?
Pray and then pray some more. And keep your eyes fixed firmly on Peter.
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