YEREVAN, MAY 27, ARMENPRESS. The Irish vote to allow gay marriage marked a “defeat for humanity”, said Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state and the Pope’s top lieutenant. The comments mark the highest-level reaction from the Catholic church to last weekend’s groundbreaking referendum.

As reports “Armenpress” citing The Financial Times, Cardinal Parolin was reflecting the unease and dismay the Irish result had triggered within the upper reaches of the Vatican, which opposes same-sex marriage and campaigned against its approval in Ireland.

“I am very sad because of this result — the Church needs to strengthen its efforts to spread its message,” Cardinal Parolin said in Rome on Tuesday. “I really think we should not just speak of this as a defeat for Christian principles but also a defeat for humanity,” he added.

Irish voters backed gay marriage by a wide margin — with 62.1 per cent in favour and 37.9 per cent against — in a sign of the rapid social transformation in the small and overwhelmingly Catholic country. Ireland has now become the first nation in the world to approve same-sex marriage by popular referendum.

After the vote, Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, suggested there needed to be soul-searching within the Church. “It is very clear that if this referendum is an affirmation of the views of young people, then the church has a huge task in front of it to find the language to be able to talk to and to get its message across to young people, not just on this issue but in general,” he told RTE, the national broadcaster.

However, Cardinal Parolin’s words suggest that inside the Vatican many will see this not as a call for greater tolerance towards gay couples, but as a call to fight the drive in favour of same-sex marriage in the western world even more aggressively.

In Italy, the centre-left government of Matteo Renzi reacted to the Irish vote by pledging to move ahead with new legislation allowing civil unions between individuals of the same sex, though gay marriage remains off the table. But the mayors of some cities, including Rome, have been recognising the gay marriages of people who wed outside Italy.

Pope Francis has always opposed gay marriage. But comments two years ago in which the Argentine pontiff said “Who am I to judge?” when asked about the presence of a “lobby” of gay priests in the Vatican stoked hopes that the Church’s attitude towards same-sex individuals was set to change.

Since then, Pope Francis has opened a debate on the family within the Church — known as a synod — which concludes later this year, and could yield instructions for priests to be more accepting of homosexuals.

However, language moving in that direction floated in a preliminary synod document last October was quickly quashed by conservative bishops and cardinals, suggesting there remains strong opposition to it.

Meanwhile, a furore erupted this year after the Vatican stalled in giving its consent to the nomination of Laurent Stefanini, who is gay, to be France’s ambassador to the Holy See.

French president François Hollande nominated Mr Stefanini in January, but the Vatican has so far failed to give him the green light, amid speculation that it is unhappy with his sexual orientation. Meanwhile, Mr Hollande has not withdrawn his pick. Cardinal Parolin offered some hope of a breakthrough in the stand-off with Paris. “The dialogue is still open and we hope it will be concluded in a positive manner,” he said.