Pope Benedict XVI travels Saturday to Spain in campaign in defence of traditional family

(07 July 2006) : Pope Benedict XVI will undertake his third trip outside Italy on Saturday, since his election as the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church in April 2005. The Holy Father will board an Airbus plane furnished by Alitalia, 8 July, leaving Rome’s Fiumicino airport at 9.30 a.m. for a two-hour flight arriving in Valencia at 11.30 am.
Pope Benedict’s appearance at the fifth World Meeting of Families in Valencia, Spain on 8 and 9 July, highlights his campaign to defend the traditional family values, in a predominantly Roman Catholic country where gay marriage, divorce and abortion are legal.
For months Pope Benedict has been denouncing gay marriage and other challenges to church doctrine in Europe and elsewhere - recently summed up by the Vatican as the «greatest threat ever» to the traditional family based on marriage between a man and a woman.
Upon receiving Spain’s new ambassador to the Holy See in May, Pope Benedict made his agenda quite clear: “The Church proclaims without reserve the primordial right to life, from conception to natural death, the right to…live in a family without it being substituted or confused by other forms or different institutions”.
The Valencia meeting is organized by Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, who recently expressed worry that the Vatican's opposition positions could one day land it before an international court of justice.