The Vatican’s newspaper slammed laws on gay marriage as an attempt at a communist-like “utopia”, a day after tens of thousands of demonstrators turned out in France to support homosexual unions.

In a scathing front-page editorial yesterday, the official Osservatore Romano daily said gay couples were in “a different reality” from heterosexual couples.

The paper took particular issue with a decision by French Catholic weekly Temoignage Chretien to offer its support for a controversial proposal to allow gay marriage in France, which is due to go before parliament next year.

“It is upsetting because in taking this position, the most banal politically correct arguments were used,” the Osservatore Romano said, adding: “Being Catholic is about much more than embracing fashionable cultural standpoints.”

“We cannot base a society on these foundations without then paying a very high price as happened in the past when there was an attempt to achieve total economic and social equality,” the paper said.

“Why repeat the same mistake and chase after an unattainable utopia?”

Gay rights campaigners held a small protest on Sunday near St Peter’s Square during Pope Benedict XVI’s weekly prayers in which they held up cut-out paper hearts with slogans like “Love Thy Neighbour” and “Love Has No Barriers“.

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