The ‘true structure’ of the family is under attack, Pope Benedict has said in his annual Christmas address to the Curia.

Quoting the Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, the Pope said the very notion of what it is to be a man or a woman is being called into question by theories which say our natures are not given and that we can be choose which gender we really are.

He said: “According to this [feminist] philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society.”

As a result of this philosophy, he continued, “Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned.”

This attitude also attacks the family because we no longer see men and women “as complementary versions of what it means to be human”

He said: “if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation.”

Meanwhile an article in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has said gay marriage denies that the differences between men and women matter and therefore it “undermines one of the basic structures of human society, the family.”

The article, by historian Lucetta Scaraffia, said the principle of equality should not be used to deny essential differences such as the differences between men and women.

She said: “History and law teach that the equality of all citizens should always be commensurate with the reality of the differences established between them.”

She continued:  “The rights of children are not those of the elderly; the rights of women are different in some respects from those of men. That does not mean they do not enjoy an equality before the law: equality that takes into account the different possibilities, but no less valuable and positive.”

She also warned that children’s rights to belong to a natural family are being forgotten and that the issue of gay marriage also gives rise to other types of exploitation, such as the buying and selling of human gametes and embryos.