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Loading ...Gay foes rally in Madrid
01.05.2009 8:13am EST
(Madrid) Tens of thousands of people attended a Mass in central Madrid just before Christmas designed to promote traditional family values in a predominantly Roman Catholic country that has legalized gay marriage and made it easier for people to divorce.
The service began with a message from Pope Benedict XVI, who urged Spanish Catholics to keep their families strong.“Dear families, do not let love, openness to life and the incomparable links that join your homes weaken,” the pope said in a message read out in Madrid. “The pope is by your side,” the pontiff added.
The archbishop of Madrid, Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, added: “the future of humanity depends on the family, the Christian family.”
Spain’s Socialist government has angered the church by legalizing gay marriage, making it easy for people to divorce and instituting a public school course in which children learn about homosexuality and same-sex marriages.
The Interior Ministry said it had no figure on attendance at Sunday’s Mass in Colon Plaza. In chilly, overcast weather, the crowd filled the square and spilled out into streets running off it.
Maria Rosa de la Cierva, leader of a church association representing Catholics in Madrid province, predicted before the Mass began that up to a million people would attend.
The Mass was concelebrated by Rouco Varela along with five other archbishops, 22 bishops and more than 300 priests.
A similar Mass and rally were held at this time last year in the same square, and organizers put attendance then at well over a million.
Lets get this out of the religious arena. The church is just a master psychologist, who trap people with guilt, threats of hell, and promises of their scam insurance policy of life after death. They are almost totally corrupt in the hierarchy, even though there are good priests at the local levels, whose choice is do as we say or out you go.
And the church rivals hitler in the number of deaths it has caused. From the tens of thousands tortured / murdered for challenging the pope during the inquisition, the million women burned as witches in an orgy of church male domination over females, to creating the hatred of the Jews that gave hitler the lever to gain total control and give the world 50 million deaths in wwii.
And lets remember that over 600 years, the church combined with corrupt kings to murder tens of millions of Muslims during the crusades. All in the name of God (Infidel is actually a word from the church that got adopted by Muslims), but really to steal the wealth of the advanced Muslim civilization of its time.
And I hope you realize that societies have long memories. The church’s devastation of that society gets remembered in the culture and language. And really, it was the the church, that laid the groundwork a thousand years ago for what gave us 9/11.
And yes, if you see how hard it is to get eg blindly following religious people to change their mind on gay marriage, you understand the mental state of the Pope, who grew up in Nazi Germany.
And to the good catholics, I can only say that I don’t hate you at all. I have compassion for you that many of you are trapped in the brainwashing of the church. And as many of my gay friends who were Catholic say, it took 10 years to finally break free of the hooks in the mind implanted by the fascists of Rome.
Drewski; you are 100% correct in your comments. The church hasn’t given up it’s dream of world wide power – restored. They have just waited for about 200 years as secular society, in their hope, ran it’s course.
The secret of California’s victory of Prop 8 is that the Vatican AND the Mormons poured money into the battle, but the Mormons agreed to ‘take the hit’ press-wise.
Benedict is a Nazi. As was IG FARBEN gas-salesman Johnn-Paul II. The Vatican has been overrun with religious facists ever since the Vatican’s concession to the Nazis in WWII.
Fortunately for us, more people – straight and gay – show up for Pride in Madrid than the vatican was able to muster for their hate-fest.
This wasn’t a homegrown protest. It was orchestrated by the Vatican. There are people who are scared by recession and uncertainty and they want to be reassured–but given the last 500 years of Iberian history, neither security nor reassurance are things that the Vatican really cares about. This rally is another manifestation of Benedict’s desire to reassert Church power in secular affairs across the planet. Since the Vatican has taken recent steps to nullify parts of the Lateran Treaties, this is less about a single “faith-based” protest in Madrid, and more about the Catholic Church edging closer to being considered an agent of destabilization in sovereign states. Notice that you don’t see such protests in France, which is just as culturally Catholic as Spain, because France has 220 years’ experience at limiting Church authority. This is a very dangerous game for Benedict to be playing.
When shall we see a Mass for the victims of paedophilia?
Or when shall we see a Requiem Mass for the hundreds of thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and non-Catholic persons MURDERED at the behest of the pope and the “teaching magisterium” of the Roman Catholic “church” over the centuries?
“Morally bankrupt” is the KINDEST thing one can say about the homophobic THUGS in the Vatican.
Bud Burgoon-Clark
San Diego CA USA
Despite this large crowd of hateful Catholics rallying in Madrid, opinion polls continue to show that a majority of Spaniards support marriage equality laws in their country. The Vatican is becoming increasingly marginalized and rejected as a morally-bankrupt institution.