I’m willing to bet he was misquoted but Bishop Robert Vasa appears to be saying here that it wuld be okay for governments to set up same-sex civil unions, as long as they are not marriage in everything but name.
Bishop Robert Vasa of the Bend-based Baker Diocese of the Catholic Church, said the church has not yet formally vetted the idea of civil unions, but he believes some kind of government recognition of same-sex couples might be appropriate.
Actually the Church has formally vetted the idea and rejected it in Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Bishop Vasa says that some type of recognition may be okay, but not that which makes it equivalent to marriage, but both of those cases have already been rejected.
Faced with the fact of homosexual unions, civil authorities adopt different positions. At times they simply tolerate the phenomenon; at other times they advocate legal recognition of such unions, under the pretext of avoiding, with regard to certain rights, discrimination against persons who live with someone of the same sex. In other cases, they favour giving homosexual unions legal equivalence to marriage properly so-called, along with the legal possibility of adopting children.
So the Vatican is saying that all legal recognitions of homosexual unions are to be avoided because they would be tolerating that which is intrinsically evil, something we should not do. Again, maybe Bishop Vasa is being misquoted or he didn’t read this document, but he’s wrong on this issue.
