Pope’s swipe at Britain’s equality laws draws ire

February 3, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

LONDON (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI’s condemnation of British equality legislation designed to protect gays and women in the workplace has deepened the battle lines between the Vatican and secularists, who demand that taxpayers not foot the security bill for his newly announced September visit.

The Roman Catholic Church’s steadfast opposition to allowing gays to become priests or having rights such as adoption puts it at odds with changing attitudes in Britain, where acceptance of homosexuality has increased dramatically in recent decades.

“I am sure many others feel the same resentment as we do at the National Secular Society at funding the presence of someone who wishes to impose a reactionary agenda of social change on us,” said the group’s president, Terry Sanderson.

The society said it would stage a film festival during Benedict’s visit, featuring “The Magdalene Sisters,” about Catholic nuns’ harsh care of teenage mothers in Ireland, and “The Boys of St. Vincent,” about sexual abuse at a Catholic orphanage in Canada. Other protests are planned.

It’s not the only conflict between Britons and the pontiff. Benedict recently surprised the Church of England by inviting traditionalist Anglicans who oppose women priests and bishops into the Roman Catholic fold, and he riled Muslims four years ago by quoting a medieval description of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings as “evil and inhuman.”

The 82-year-old Benedict, who was the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer before succeeding John Paul II in 2005, has put a firm, conservative stamp on his papacy. Reinvigorating the faith in an increasingly secular Europe has been a central mission of his papacy.

In an address to English bishops Monday in which he confirmed his planned visit, Benedict said some British legislation had imposed “unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.” Benedict did not make a specific complaint about equality acts past or pending but complained that the law had in some cases violated “the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.”

On the ground of natural law, the Roman Catholic catechism also condemns homosexual acts as “intrinsically dissolute.”

Many critics in Britain saw the pope’s comments as a criticism of labor legislation — both existing and proposed — and also interpreted it as denouncing the notion of hiring women, transsexuals and gays in the church.

The issue of homosexual rights brought the church into collision with British law, which holds that no organization can discriminate against gays. That applies to adoption agencies, even Catholic ones, who were refusing to place children with gay couples.

In response, five formerly Catholic agencies cut their ties to the church so that they could continue to operate.