I read recently that the numbers of stars visible from earth with current technology is large: the figure has no name, but it starts with a one and has 73 zeros after it. The average human brain simply can't cope with that; and equally, nor can it cope with the Vatican's description of homosexual acts as "evil". Though maybe out there somewhere among all those stars, there's a planet inhabited by a people who can make sense of such nonsense.
This is not to say that the Catholic Church is wrong by its own lights to oppose homosexual "marriage". Sexual morals and the family are areas with which the Catholic Church has always busied itself, and though I might have reservations if the Vatican made pronouncements on the offside law in rugby, or l.b.w. in cricket - matters on which the conclave of cardinals probably have passionate feelings - I can see they have every right to propound on homosexual "marriage".
They even have the right to call it evil - though to use such a word about a public and legally binding statement of shared love and fidelity is making my grasp of the English language a little uncertain. For if it is evil to commit oneself to love and serve another person down all the days of one's life, then how does one describe an equally solemn resolution to beat the other person's brains out with a claw-hammer, fry them in beer-batter and feed them to wild dogs? Yet what is most curious about the Vatican's statement is that it presumes the state should adopt the Vatican's own attitude towards marriage, which it certainly doesn't at the moment. Two marriages occur in a modern Catholic ceremony: the religious one and the civic one. They are quite distinct, though they overlap procedurally, and the Catholic Church has always insisted on its version of marriage being anterior and superior to the state version.
Thus the Church implicitly recognises that the state marriage is a civil contract, binding in law before civil courts, just like any other contract.
It is not a marriage in the Catholic sense. So, it surely cannot be "evil" to wish to extend the general terms of that contract so as to include people of the same sex. We may argue about the word marriage, but why bother? To the Catholic Church, a man can no more marry another man than a chrysanthemum can come first at Crufts or Liam Lawlor can become King William IV.
When Seamus "marries" Sean or Attracta "marries" Goretti in a state ceremony, all they're guilty of - at the very worst - is misuse of words. A misnomer is simply being attributed to a particular contract, rather like calling a hare a rabbit. For marriage is not a legal contract in Catholic thinking but the sacramental prelude to the formation of a family; and even when a family is no longer possible, marriage provides a sacramental authorisation to behave as a fertile married couple.
Only the most militant and demented of homosexual activists would demand that the Catholic Church change its rules to suit their agenda, yet the Catholic Church is demanding of secular states that they enforce its ban on the word "marriage" for civil contracts between two people of the same sex.
This is all quite bizarre. Because the cruelty involved when cohabiting couples are not allowed to make such a legal commitment can be very considerable indeed, especially at a time of illness or death, and extending from visitation rights in hospital to the loss of tenancy rights, inheritance rights and pension rights. To be sure, to extend such rights to sexually active lesbians but not to extend them (say) to two spinsters who live together in emotional unity but sexual solitude is clearly unfair. But of course, that is a libertarian objection, and not quite the Vatican's, and it is one which could, with a little creative thinking, soon be attended to.
However, the Catholic Church declares that if the state approves "deviant" behaviour, this obscures "basic values" of the common inheritance of humanity. Well, as it happens, the state approves of numerous things - armies which train young men to murder other young men, motor cars which kill thousands of people every year, limited liability companies which can lawfully renege on debts, usurious banks, hunting wild animals and slowly and brutally killing bulls in an enclosed arena - which might be said to be deviant behaviours which obscure "the common inheritance of humanity." To which the Catholic Church has said - what, please?
How civil society orders itself is its business. If the Catholic Church wishes to prevent its members from availing of certain legal services being offered by the state, it can lay down its ruling in the matter, and the rest is up to individuals. But it surely cannot expect the governments of the world to enforce its pelvic obsessions upon the laws of tort and contract, nor the rest of us to acquiesce in its bizarre use of the word "evil".
This hasn't been easy for me to write, because I sense I might be in agreement with the equality commissars - a disagreeable sensation which makes me yearn for a whiff of John Charles's episcopal gunpowder, as his becassocked figure strode through the Dublin of yore, felling Protestants and liberals with glee.
Ah well, so be it. For it comes to St Matthew: Render therefore unto Caesar what is Caesar's; and unto God what is God's. Or even, unto Guy what are guys.