Excerpt:
Based…upon natural creation, even as our Lord Jesus Christ did as reported in the holy Gospels…the Church recognizes the word, “marriage,” as designating only one datum: the fleshly union of one man and one woman, “just as Adam and Eve in the beginning of the world” (ancient betrothal, Service of Matrimony) in an exclusive way, allowing no others.
It is this exclusive union of love which alone is fertile and thus the nursery of the human race until the end of time. Any other so-called “marriage,” including socalled “same-sex marriage,” is a forgery and death-dealing, sterile and doomed to frustration and the ruin of body and soul of its participants.
Therefore, the Church cannot recognize or countenance any other definition of marriage by any human law, since any such “law” contrary to God’s own created ordinance cannot stand as law, but is and will be a dead letter. “There is a way which seemeth right to a man, but the end thereof is death.” This, then, is the Church’s word to our North American people.
Met. Joseph is the Archbishop of the Antiochian Orthodox Church of North America.
Download/Print the Archiepiscopal Directive
