Marriage Quote by Joseph Ratzinger

Ratzinger’s line performs a careful two-step that reads pastoral on the surface and disciplinary underneath. The opening clause - “great respect,” “these people,” “also suffer” - frames gay people primarily through affliction and moral searching, not identity or civic equality. “These people” keeps a polite distance; “also” quietly places them in a category of human woundedness that the Church can acknowledge without affirming the relationships in question. It’s empathy as boundary-setting.

Then comes the pivot: “On the other hand.” The phrase is doing more work than the argument that follows. It signals that respect is not permission, and that compassion can coexist with refusal. “To create a legal form” narrows the debate to bureaucratic engineering, not dignity or rights. The phrase “a kind of homosexual marriage” further downgrades the institution: not marriage, but an imitation, a legal facsimile. He’s denying moral equivalence in the grammar itself.

The clincher - “in reality, does not help these people” - is classic Ratzinger: a claim to realism that turns a political question into a therapeutic one. If legal recognition is rebranded as unhelpful, even harmful, opposition becomes an act of care rather than power. Context matters: as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later pope, Ratzinger was shoring up a Catholic framework threatened by rapidly liberalizing European law and culture. The intent isn’t simply to reject same-sex marriage; it’s to preserve the Church’s authority to define what counts as “correct living,” while appearing humane to a modern audience increasingly skeptical of that authority.