Pope Benedict XVI offered comfort Friday to anyone that's worried the Catholic Church might have changed too much over the last few thousand years. He still thinks gay marriage is against human nature, poses a threat to "justice and peace," and suggested same-sex unions were "unnatural," Fox News reported.
Presented by the Holy See, the head of the Roman Catholic Church released his annual message for the aptly-named World Day of Peace 2013 saying there was a very real need to acknowledge and promote opposite-sex marriages as "natural."
"There is...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," Pope Benedict XVI said, according to Gay Star News.
"Such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society. These principles are not truths of faith, nor are they simply a corollary of the right to religious freedom. They are inscribed in human nature itself, accessible to reason and thus common to all humanity," he added.
One of the world's most famous confirmed bachelors, the Pope went on to suggest that support of gay marriage "constitutes an offense against the truth of the human person, with serious harm to justice and peace," ANSA noted.
Laws granting legal status for gay unions, the Pope said, "actually harm and help destabilize marriage" because these relationships obscure the fact that male-female unions are basis of society.
In September, the pope said gay people are not fully developed humans because they do not obey Catholic law, the Huffington Post reported. Earlier in 2012, the Associated Press reported the church leader had denounced gay marriage as being "insidious and dangerous."
The Pope went on to say abortion was also significant threat to peace.
"Those who insufficiently value human life, and in consequence, support among other things the liberalization of abortion perhaps do not realize that in this way they are proposing the pursuit of a false peace," since peace presupposes protecting the weakest, he wrote, reported Fox News.
The Pope's comments have already drawn fire from activist groups. Protestors reportedly gathered in St. Peter's Square during the 85-year-old's weekly address there carrying signs in numerous languages, including some reading: "Marriage for All" and "Homophobia (equals) death."
Police quickly seized the signs from at least four protestors who entered the square Sunday, reported the Associated Press.
"Gay unions don't harm peace. Weapons do," said the organizers of the protest in a statement.
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