Moves to legally redefine marriage harm and destabilise that institution, Pope Benedict has warned. 
In a message to mark the World Day of Peace next month, the Pope said that there was a need “to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union”.
Such attempts, he said “actually harm and help to destabilise marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society”.
These principles, he said were “not truths of faith” but “inscribed in human nature itself”.
The Church’s efforts to promote marriage was not “confessional in character, but addressed to all people, whatever their religious affiliation”.
Pope Benedict added: “Efforts of this kind are all the more necessary the more these principles are denied or misunderstood, since this constitutes an offence against the truth of the human person, with serious harm to justice and peace.”
He also insisted that Governments and courts “must recognise the right to invoke the principle of conscientious objection in the face of laws or government measures that offend against human dignity, such as abortion and euthanasia”.
The Pope said: “One of the fundamental human rights, also with reference to international peace, is the right of individuals and communities to religious freedom.”
It was becoming increasingly important to promote this right, both in terms the right to freely choose one’s religion but also in terms of the freedom to bear witness to one’s religion, and to promote it.
“Sadly, even in countries of long-standing Christian tradition, instances of religious intolerance are becoming more numerous, especially in relation to Christianity and those who simply wear identifying signs of their religion,” he added.
Meanwhile, the retired Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor in a letter to The Daily Telegraph today describes marriage as “an institution of central importance for the welfare of society as a whole, to believers and unbelievers alike”.
He said, “marriage is and should remain a unique and binding contract between a man and a woman, open in principle to the possibility of generating children”.