Santiago, January 7, 2005
Director of ‘Acción Familia’
Dear Mr. Montes,
I have received the copy of the book, Defending a Higher Law, which you kindly sent me I and sincerely thank you for having sent it.
The theme of homosexuality has attracted the attention of moralists and historians for many centuries and appears in a relevant manner in the Sacred Scriptures both in the Old and New Testaments, in which homosexual acts and practices have a clearly negative connotation. The Church has maintained an explicitly negative stand toward such acts and practices, pronouncing them objectively incompatible with the law of God.
One must distinguish between homosexual tendencies, whose origin is still debated among scientists, and concrete erotic and homosexual acts which, from the standpoint of Christian morals, are objectively sinful. One thing is the “tendency,” that can be guiltless, and another, and very different one, is to actually exercise it. But it gets even worse if there is an attempt to establish homosexual practice as a “right;” and it becomes even more harmful if the parties obtain from civil authority some sort of recognition or legitimacy. Such recognition and legitimation are opposed to the common good of society to the degree that they induce people to see with tolerance and complacency attitudes that destroy the concept of matrimony and family, and to place on the same footing institutions in conformity with human nature with others that are crude and aberrant.
Order PRINT copy.
The work you are distributing is a valuable contribution to inform the public on a topic that becomes increasingly relevant since many are expressing support for it [homosexuality] thus corroding the principles of social life founded on the Christian faith and on morals founded in natural law.
May the Lord bless this effort of clarification and truth for the good of Christian consciences and those of men of good will who believe that human nature and its requirements stem from a loving design of God, Who seeks nothing but man’s happiness.
I greet you and bless you in the Lord Jesus,
Cardinal Jorge A. Medina Estévez
Prefect Emeritus of the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments