The Church will remain committed to its teaching that marriage is between a man and a woman, whether the State 
legalises same-sex marriage or not, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has said.
Speaking yesterday at a question and answer session after his talk at the McGill Summer School, he said: “The Church will teach its teaching about the complementarity of man and woman as being something that is essential to marriage and that marriage is not a simple social construct which can be changed at will.”
But he added that there were “other ways in which the rights of individuals and of people living in relationships” could be respected.
“Before, during or after the enactment of legislation regarding gay marriage the Church will continue to teach its teaching. The church’s teaching is to teach something rather than to oppose it,” Archbishop Martin said.
In his speech, he said that marriage was “not a simple social construct which can be changed at will”.
He said: “Certainly there are many changes in how marriage and the family are lived out at a given time. For the Church, however, there is something unique in the complementarity of man and woman in the human situation and life-long commitment is an essential dimension of the Church’s understanding of marriage.
“The concept of life-long commitment and fidelity are hard to understand in today’s culture, but most young people who come for marriage in Church have a genuine hope that their marriage will be successful and will develop and mature with the passage of years.
He also insisted that the Church in Ireland had to “find ways to make its voice heard clearly about important moral issues which are under discussion” and added that Irish secular society “also has to go along the road of dialogue and not anathema and exclusion regarding the voice of religion”.
He said: “A pluralist society, as any other society in history, benefits from the presence of religion. We should not forget or deny what was wrong. Believers, however, have to be more confident in themselves about the contribution they make to our society through being men and women of faith and within and through their faith communities.”