ROME — Jesuit Father James Martin, an LGBT advocate, affirmed Saturday his belief that two men can enter into a real marriage that must be recognized as such.
Responding to Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, who proposed that Pete Buttigieg’s same-sex marriage to his partner Chasten is not a true marriage but rather a “legal fiction,” Father Martin countered that “Pete Buttigieg is married.”
Pete Buttigieg is married. https://t.co/3eiX0bt3Im
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) January 21, 2023
The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines marriage as a covenant “by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love.”
For their part, the United States Bishops note that a “growing movement today favors making those relationships commonly called same-sex unions the legal equivalent of marriage,” a proposal that the Catholic Church rejects.
Marriage “is a faithful, exclusive, lifelong union of a man and a woman joined in an intimate community of life and love,” the bishops declare. While man and woman are equal, “they are different from but made for each other.”
These truths about marriage are not mere religious beliefs but are “present in the order of nature and can be perceived by the light of human reason,” the bishops add.
In the longer essay to which Father Martin was responding, Bill Donohue asserts that no man “can have a husband any more than a man can bear a child. He can say he does but that doesn’t make it true.”
“Nature can be stubborn. It is not a social construct. It is fixed. The sooner we learn this verity, the better off our society will be,” Donohue declared.
“So what should we call Chasten, if he is not Buttigieg’s husband? His partner,” he said. “The two of them may not like it, but truth is not determined by what is popular. It is determined by what makes sense according to nature and nature’s God.”
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