Every child needs a male father and a female mother. So wrote Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires before becoming Pope Francis.
In a day where there is personal and cultural confusion about what it means to be a woman and a man, what it means to be a family, and even when human imagination trumps the reality of human sexuality, it is refreshing to hear such a clear word from Pope Francis.
The word is clear because it is being driven by Biblical revelation and comports with history and reality. It takes a male and a female to conceive a child. This is simple biology. It makes sense that the One who designed us male and female and who outrageously conceived of the beauty of human sexuality and who instituted the process of procreation, would ordain the male to be a father and the female to be a mother to create a comprehensive and complementary environment for the nurturing of their children.
In the 2010 book On Heaven and Earth, co-authored with biophysicist and Jewish rabbi, Abraham Skorka, Pope Francis writes of the importance of the natural family. He points out that from ancient times there have been homosexual relationships. They have variously been celebrated or condemned, but never has there been an attempt to elevate homosexuality to the level of marriage until this modern day. He writes:
We know that in times of momentous change the homosexual phenomenon grew, but in this period it is the first time that the legal problem of assimilating it to marriage has arisen, and this I consider an anti-value and an anthropological regression. I say this because it transcends the religious issue, it is anthropological. If there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party nor is society affected. Now, if the union is given the category of marriage and they are given adoption rights, there could be children affected. Every person needs a male father and a female mother that can help them shape their identity.
Let us be clear, ideas have consequences. There’s a continuum at work in all this that proponents of same-sex marriage wish to deny.
- First we redefined life’s origins. We decided life begins when the mother wants the baby.
- Now we are redefining marriage. We have abandoned the lifelong covenantal relationship between a man and a woman. In its place, we are endorsing homosexual unions.
- On the heels of this is the redefinition of human sexuality so that children can declare themselves either male or female and even begin the process of so called “gender transformation.”
- We will soon turn our attention to pedophilia, and fabricate another lexical distortion giving adults freedom to have sex with minors.
This downward spiral will continue because each of these is cut from the same ideological cloth: the creature knows better than the Creator.
Thank goodness for Pope Francis’ clear statement on the need for every person to have a father who is male and a mother who is female.
– Darrow Miller with Gary Brumbelow
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