Italy: Impressive demonstration against “marriage for everybody”

On Saturday, January 30, 2016, almost one million persons from all parts of Italy gathered in Rome, in the Circus Maximus, to participate in a demonstration against “marriage for everybody”, sponsored by Difendiamo i nostri figli (Committee to Defend Our Children). That evening, the organizers cited “official” sources that spoke of between 780,000 and a million persons, Le Point reported on January 31. This “Family Day” was the occasion for an immense rally in opposition to the draft law on civil unions for same-sex couples and on the adoption by such couples of the children of one of the two partners, two days after the beginning of debate in the Senate about the language of the bill.

The banner: "We're here for the love of our children."

Among the demonstrators, reporters noted the presence of many lay Catholics, representatives of dioceses, of Catholic family associations, and of lay ecclesial movements that are very active on the Italian Peninsula, as well as nuns and monks, priests, and politicians who are members of the opposition. Several government leaders, among them the Minister of the Interior Angelino Alfano, a member of the New Center-Right, a minority partner of the coalition, participated in the demonstrations, since they oppose the adoption by the homosexual couple of a child of one of the partners.

The neurosurgeon Massimo Gandolfini, spokesman of the Difendiamo i nostrit figli Committee, reminded the crowds on the Circus Maximus that he did not want to marginalize anyone or put anyone in a ghetto, “but rather to say clearly that the fabric of the nation is made up of families, and these families must be supported.” He declared the draft bill “unacceptable from the first word to the last.... It must be rejected in its entirety,” emphasized that “we are all born of one man and one woman,” and explained that “this means a natural society; the other forms of so-called families will profoundly disrupt the very structure of humanity.” As an aside, he remarked that during the next elections of legislators in 2018 “we will remember those who stood on the side of the family and the children, and also the others....” Simone Pillon, a member of the organizing Committee, was quoted by the January 31 issue of La Croix as saying that “this draft bill introduces de facto gay marriage in Italy. And by authorizing adoption, it would legitimize surrogate pregnancy. This is why we must stop it.”

Prominent among the associations present was Famiglia Domani [Family Tomorrow], which together with the European Movement in Defense of Life (MEDV) had first organized in 2011 the National March for Life takes place each year in Rome. Its January 22 press release had staunchly declared: “Famiglia Domani opposes, rejects, and refutes in its entirety the draft Cirinna Law and states forcefully that protecting the family is inseparable from a total, integral defense of the truth of the natural and Christian order.”

Italy is the last remaining European country not to have passed laws about civil unions for homosexual couples. The Prime Minister Matteo Renzi had promised that the law would be adopted before the end of last year, but he ran into strong resistance even within his own coalition. He said that he wanted to keep trying, even though 36 Democratic Party members of Parliament were asking him to reject the adoption of children of one of the partners, in the case of a homosexual union.

Lupo Glori, in the January 31 issue of Correspondance européenne, recalls that the January 30 demonstration is notably different from the one held on May 12, 2007, against the draft law entitled “Rights and Duties of Persons Living in a Stable Cohabiting Relationship” (referred to by the acronym DICO in Italian, similar to the French contractual “civil unions”) that had been proposed by the government of Romano Prodi. “Whereas in 2007, the Italian Episcopal Conference had called on Catholics to go out into the streets to protest an unacceptable law, paradoxically the roles today are reversed, and, after the demonstration on Saint John Lateran Square on June 20, 2015, in which thousands of persons protested against the teaching of gender theory in the schools, today the Catholic people themselves are the ones addressing a resounding “non possumus” [“we cannot”] to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, inviting them to join in.” (See DICI no. 329 dated January 29, 2016, on the shilly-shallying of the Pope and the Italian bishops). “In this sense,” Roberto de Mattei writes at the website Corrispondenza Romana on February 3, “the Italy of Family Day is not the one of Bishop Nunzio Galantino, Secretary of the Italian Episcopal Conference, nor that of associations such as Communion and Liberation, the Association of Italian Catholic Scouts and Guides, the Focolari Movement, or Renewal in the Spirit, which deserted the Circus Maximus on January 30.” At the conclusion of that day, Massimo Gandolfini exclaimed: “For us the battle, for God the glory!”

(Sources: apic/la croix/correspondance européenne/famiglia domani/ Corrispondenza Romana – DICI no. 330 dated February 12, 2016)

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