As noted here, Bishop Tobin issued a statement which reads:
"The Holy Father’s apparent support for the recognition of civil unions for same-sex couples needs to be clarified. The Pope’s statement clearly contradicts what has been the long-standing teaching of the Church about same-sex unions. The Church cannot support the acceptance of objectively immoral relationships. Individuals with same-sex attraction are beloved children of God and must have their personal human rights and civil rights recognized and protected by law. However, the legalization of their civil unions, which seek to simulate holy matrimony, is not admissible.
It is the traditional teaching of the Church founded by Christ the Lord that "only in legitimate marriage does the use of the sexual faculty find its true meaning and its probity." (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Persona Humana, 5, AAS 68 (1976) 82, Cannery, 2:489).
This teaching is based on the fact that all human acts must be evaluated by objective criteria, based on the nature of human persons and human action, and all sexual acts must respect the full meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love. See Gaudium et Spes, No. 51.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that: "Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.'" (2357).
Which is why, in his 1994 Angelus Address, protesting against a special resolution crafted by the European Parliament encouraging the nations of Europe to approve homosexual "marriage," Pope John Paul II said that, "What is not morally acceptable, however, is the legalization of homosexual acts. To show understanding towards the person who sins, towards the person who is not in the process of freeing himself from this tendency, does not at all mean to diminish the demands of the moral norm (cf. Veritatis Splendor, No. 95)...
But we must say that what was intended with the European Parliament's resolution was the legitimization of a moral disorder. Parliament improperly conferred an institutional value to a conduct that is deviant and not in accordance with God's plan...Forgetting the words of Christ 'The truth shall set you free' (John 8:32), an attempt was made to show the people of our continent a moral evil, a deviance, a certain slavery, as a form of liberation, falsifying the very essence of the family."
