“Best wishes, Don Loris”. Signed “The family of affections”. Someone bought an entire page of the newspaper La Repubblica on newsstands today (page 12), to wish a 90th birthday to Don Loris Capovilla, former personal secretary of Pope John XXIII and former archbishop of Chieti and Vasto. Even among high-ranking Vatican prelates, therefore, there are those who use the term "family" to indicate a community founded on affection. Woe betide anyone who uses the word "family" to refer to gay and lesbian couples.
“We too join in the good wishes to Monsignor Capovilla — observes the national president of Arcigay, Sergio Lo Giudice – and we are pleased that the elderly prelate has around him a community of affections that considers itself, in its entirety, his family. The problem is that when homosexual couples or unmarried heterosexual couples claim, for their relationship, the dignity of a family founded on love and mutual responsibility, the leaders of the Catholic Church lash out furious anathemas. 'Only the union between a man and a woman, aimed at procreation, can be called a family!' pontificate the Pope and bishops. And then we discover that even within the Vatican palaces there are those who dare to use the term 'family' to indicate a bond founded on affection.‘
“It is known, on the other hand — continues Lo Giudice — that even the group of people who are close to the pontiff during the day is said «"the Pope's family"»: the conservative clergy reserves for themselves and their loved ones the dignity of the title of de facto family, while viciously attacking other emotional communities that ask to be recognized with the term family: a hypocritical attitude that actually hides a desire to deny the dignity and social visibility of homosexual people and their emotional relationships.
