Bishop Salvatore Cordileone believes
gay marriage contributes to a rise in poverty.
Cordileone, who leads the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops' (USCCB) Subcommittee for the
Promotion and Defense of Marriage and heads the diocese of San
Francisco, made his remarks in an interview with the San
Francisco Chronicle.
When asked how the Roman Catholic
Church justifies spending money, time and resources opposing gay
nuptials when it could be directing those resources towards fighting
poverty, Cordileone answered that the two issues were intertwined and
suggested that the children of gay parents are poor in “spirit.”
“Marriage and poverty are deeply
intertwined concerns: an extremely high percentage of people in
poverty are from broken families, and when the family breaks up it
increases the risk of sliding into poverty, with single parents
(usually mothers) making heroic sacrifices for their children as they
struggle to fulfill the role of both mother and father. And beyond
material poverty there is that poverty of the spirit in which kids
hunger for their missing parent, who often seems absent and
disengaged from their lives. We all have a deep instinct for
connectedness to where we came from, and we deeply desire it when we
do not have it.”
“Promoting stable marriages is
actually one of the best things we can do to help eradicate poverty;
in fact, it is a necessary, even if by itself alone not a sufficient,
part of the solution – that is, we cannot hope to fix the problem
without it. The solution to poverty certainly requires a
multi-faceted strategy; we need efforts such as job training and
placement for those in poverty, quality education for at risk youth,
and so on. My Church is also involved in many of these kinds of
efforts. But neither are these efforts alone sufficient. To focus
exclusively on this, without educating our young people for marriage
– teaching them to desire marriage and to develop the virtue
necessary to sustain the demanding but rewarding commitment of
marriage – would be like putting a bandage on a mortal wound.
Rebuilding a marriage culture in which both men and women understand
they need to come together in marriage to raise their children is not
a distraction from poverty, it's one necessary part of helping to
alleviate poverty.”