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Pope Speaks on Creation

VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict linked the Catholic Church's opposition to gay marriage to concern about the environment, suggesting that laws undermining "the differences between the sexes" were threats to creation.

He issued the admonition in a speech to ambassadors accredited to the Vatican, an annual appointment during which the pontiff reflects on issues the Vatican wants to highlight to the diplomatic corps. The main theme of the address was the environment and the protection of creation.

"Creatures differ from one another and can be protected, or endangered in different ways, as we know from daily experience. One such attack comes from laws or proposals, which, in the name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between the sexes," he said. "I am thinking, for example, of certain countries in Europe or North and South America."

This was a clear reference to legislation either enacted or proposed in several parts of the world. Last month, Mexico City became the first capital in Catholic Latin America to allow same-sex marriage.

In California, the U.S. state's ban on gay marriage went to trial on Monday in a federal case that plaintiffs hope to take all the way to the Supreme Court and overturn bans throughout the nation. Gay marriage is legal in several U.S. states and in some European countries.

In his speech to diplomats from more than 170 countries, the pontiff criticized the "economic and political resistance" to fighting environmental degradation that was exemplified in the negotiations to draft a new climate treaty at last month's summit in Copenhagen.

Officials from 193 countries met at the summit, which ended Dec. 19 having failed to produce a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It produced instead a nonbinding accord that included few concrete steps to combat global warming.

Pope Benedict didn't name countries responsible for bogging down negotiations, but he listed as the victims island nations at risk of rising seas, and Africa, where the battle for natural resources and overexploitation of land has resulted in wars.

"To cultivate peace, one must protect creation," the pope told the ambassadors. The pontiff said the same "self-centered and materialistic" way of thinking that sparked the world-wide financial meltdown also was endangering creation. To combat it will require a new way of thinking and a new lifestyle -- and an acknowledgment that the question is a moral one, he said.

"The protection of creation is not principally a response to an aesthetic need, but much more to a moral need, inasmuch as nature expresses a plan of love and truth, which is prior to us and which comes from God," he said.

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