While opposing "unjust discrimination" against homosexuals, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that homosexual acts are "contrary to the natural law" and can never be approved and that marriage is the sacramental union of a man and a woman.

"Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,'" says the Catechism. "They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

"Homosexual persons are called to chastity," says the Catechism. "Sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman."