The bishops hurled up their cassocks today to sit on the fence – meanwhile the ‘catholic groups’ are distributing rubbish in churches, the streets and at religious meetings on Lisbon. I was ‘lucky’ enough to pick up a copy today.

Entitled ‘9 reasons why a conscientious Catholic citizen should reject the Treaty of Lisbon‘, it includes such wonders as

– The amended Treaties impose a relativist, evolving vision of human rights, contrary to the Catholic understanding of them
– The amended Treaties considerably restrict the protection of human life and authorise abortion, embryo experimentation, non-reproductive human cloning and euthanasia
– The amended Treaties, for the first time in an international juridical document, recognise “sexual orientationâ€? as a basis for non-discrimination
– The amended Treaties, for the first instance in an international juridical document, impose the parity between men and women in all areas
– The amended Treaties undermine the concept of family by dissociating it from the marriage between a man and a woman
– The amended Treaties impose excessive limits to the right of parents to educate their children according to their beliefs

And they’re obsessed by the gays….

As conscientious Irish Catholics, we cannot but say “No� to a Treaty that imposes on our country and on the whole of Europe, for the first instance in an international legally binding document, the prohibition of any discrimination based on sexual orientation, which will in its turn impose on us the placement of children for adoption or foster care in the hands of homosexual partners, the employment of teachers or athletic coaches with homosexual lifestyles, the obligation to grant accommodation to homosexual partners in B&B facilities, etc. and will restrict the freedom of the Church to preach the Gospel.

I haven’t seen that athletics coach thing since 1992 – I’d say there were copies of documents by Family Solidarity hanging round the place when this particular tome was written. Then I looked at the back for the references and noted that the above is based on the reading of Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Some Considerations Concerning the Response to Legislative Proposals on the Non-discrimination of Homosexual Persons, Vatican, July 22, 1992. which was bad then and still reads rotten now. Rattzinger wrote it!

So while I worry about qualified majority voting and privatising healthcare, some people in Ireland are still worrying about back passages as Gay Byrne once said.