Portland, Maine Bishop Richard Malone on Friday announced that the Roman Catholic church will fight a proposed gay marriage ballot question with an educational campaign, the Kennebec Journal reported.

Malone said that the Diocese of Maine will not campaign against a fall ballot question proposed by gay marriage supporters which, if approved, would reverse a 2009 question that repealed the state's gay marriage law approved by lawmakers. Instead, the church will teach Catholics about how it defines marriage.

(Related: Maine gay marriage question qualifies for ballot.)

“We are going to ask them to reconsider their understanding of what marriage is,” Malone told reporters. “So many people in my opinion have forgotten the unique and particular qualities that must be present to constitute a marriage, including having the intention of raising a family.”

The centerpiece of the diocese's Beauty of Marriage campaign is a 24-page pastoral letter written by Malone.

In one passage, Malone wrote that it is not discriminatory to deny gay couples the right to marry.

“All of us are sensitive to what are clearly discriminatory acts or speech, or even appearances of being unfair or unkind. Today, the cause for the legal recognition of various human relationships is often equated with non-discrimination, fairness, equality, and civil rights. But when we say that these relationships cannot be called marriage by legal definition, we are not discriminating, but rather, we are marking the obvious and essential difference between marriage and every other form of relationship.”

The educational campaign stands in stark contrast to the $500,000 the diocese contributed to the 2009 campaign to repeal the law.