The following comes from an Oct. 9 story on LifeSiteNews.com.

In an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews, Cardinal Raymond Burke has responded to a controversial presentation by an Australian couple before 191 of the Catholic Church’s leading bishops and cardinals at the ongoing Extraordinary Synod on the Family this week.

During their intervention, which has turned out to be one of the most widely reported interventions at the Synod, the Priolas asked and answered a question about what parents should do in the case where their son wants to bring his homosexual partner to a Christmas dinner where their grandchildren will be present.

The Pirolas’ response, which they held up as a model for the manner in which the Catholic Church should deal with same-sex relationships, was that parents should accept the participation of the son and his homosexual partner knowing “their grandchildren would see them welcome the son and his partner into the family.”

Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols revealed afterwards that some Synod fathers responded to the short intervention by the couple “very warmly, with applause.”

Speaking to LifeSiteNews on a short break from the Synod yesterday, Cardinal Burke, the Prefect of the Vatican’s Apostolic Signitura, called the Pirolas’ question a ‘delicate’ question that needs to be addressed in a “calm, serene, reasonable and faith-filled manner.”

“If homosexual relations are intrinsically disordered, which indeed they are — reason teaches us that and also our faith — then, what would it mean to grandchildren to have present at a family gathering a family member who is living [in] a disordered relationship with another person?” asked the cardinal.

Burke added, “we don’t want our children” to get the “impression” that sexual relationships outside God’s plan are alright, “by seeming to condone gravely sinful acts on the part of a family member.”

“We wouldn’t, if it were another kind of relationship — something that was profoundly disordered and harmful — we wouldn’t expose our children to that relationship, to the direct experience of it. And neither should we do it in the context of a family member who not only suffers from same-sex attraction, but who has chosen to live out that attraction, to act upon it, committing acts which are always and everywhere wrong, evil.”

He added, however, that “families have to find a way to stay close to a child in this situation — to a son or grandson, or whatever it may be — in order to try to draw the person away from a relationship which is disordered.”

Cardinal Burke’s concerns were shared by Voice of the Family, a coalition of 15 major pro-life and pro-family groups from every continent, who called the Pirolas intevention “damaging.”

“The unqualified welcome of homosexual couples into family and parish environments in fact damages everybody, by serving to normalise the disorder of homosexuality,” said Voice of the Family spokesman Maria Madise in a press release.

In an interview with Aleteia, Father Paul Check, the head of Courage, the Catholic group that works to assist those with same-sex attraction to live chaste lives, responded to the question, noting, “We can never be more pastoral than Jesus.”

He added, “To welcome people into the Church, into our homes, into conversation … to ‘accept them’ in an authentic Christ-like way would never call for a compromise of the truth.” An example of that comprise he said, would be to “say to someone in some form, ‘Well, that’s the best you can do.’”

To read the full interview, click here.