Apr 07, 2006   | COMMENTS     

VATICAN CITY — Speaking just 10 days ahead of Italy’s national elections, Pope Benedict XVI lashed out against gay marriage and abortion on March 30 and said the Church had the right to speak out on political issues, Reuters reported. Opposition center-left politicians who advocate some legal recognition of the rights of unmarried heterosexual and gay couples accused the pope of meddling in politics. Addressing lawmakers from the European People’s Party (EPP), Benedict said the Church’s position on such issues was "non-negotiable," Reuters reported. Benedict said the Church had a right and duty to defend "the recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family as a union between a man and a woman based on marriage." Opposition politicians criticized the pope’s comments as political interference. "It is people who decide whether their relationships constitute a family ... Not everyone shares the pope’s point of view," said Franco Grillini, a gay parliamentarian of the Democrats of the Left, Italy’s largest leftist party. A survey released earlier this year cast doubt on how much influence the Church will have on the elections, with a majority of Italian Catholics disagreeing with papal doctrine on some moral and social issues.

Gift to cardinal angers some San Fran officials

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco Police Commissioner Joe Alioto Veronese upset some city officials after he attended the installation of William Levada as Cardinal during ceremonies in Rome and presented him with a paperweight from the city, Reuters reported. Levada was archbishop of San Francisco before becoming a cardinal March 29. Pope Benedict XVI also named him to be Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith as well as dean of the new group of cardinals. Mayor Gavin Newsome and other San Francisco city dignitaries boycotted Levada’s installation because Levada called for Catholic Charities to stop allowing same-sex couples to adopt. Angela Alioto, a former city supervisor and the police commissioner’s mother, organized their trip to the Vatican. She got the crystal paperweight etched with the San Francisco’s official seal from the city’s office of protocol, Reuters reported.

Asheville minister resigns ordination over gay unions

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Rev. Howard Hanger announced March 26 that he will turn in his ordination to the United Methodist Church. Hanger told the congregation of Jubilee! Community, a nondenominational church, that his decision was due to his difference with the denomination over its stance on gay unions, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported. Hanger joins Revs. Joe Hoffman and Mark Ward in protesting institutional stances on same-sex marriages. Hoffman, pastor of the 200-member First Congregational United Church of Christ in Asheville, and Ward, pastor of the 540-member Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville, both announced in recent weeks that they would no longer perform civil marriage ceremonies for North Carolina until the state recognizes same-sex marriages. In a written statement, Hanger called the decision "a no-brainer, but a heavy-hearter."

Conservative rabbis’ rulechange may help gays

MEXICO CITY — In a move that could make it easier to permit gay rabbis and same-sex unions, members of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly voted March 22 to lower the threshold for approving major revisions to rabbinic and even biblical law, the Forward, a N.Y. Jewish weekly, reported. The measure allows the Conservative movement’s top lawmaking body, the Committee on Jewish Law & Standards, to approve major revisions to rabbinic law with the approval of 13 out of 25 voting members. It overturns the decision by the assembly’s executive council last June to establish a 20-vote threshold for major changes. The procedural issue had become the subject of great debate among Conservative rabbis after the law committee met earlier this month to reconsider the movement’s stance on homosexuality. Following the law committee’s recent meeting, some movement rabbis criticized the executive council for approving a significant rule change in the middle of the movement’s reevaluation of homosexuality and for failing to communicate about the change.