VATICAN CITY, August 1 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Seeking to preserve strong family ties and conceptions, agreed upon by all three major Divine religions, the Vatican launched Saturday, July 31, a diatribe against radical feminism, which calls for same-sex marriages.

In a 37-page document "On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World," the Vatican said women should be respected and have equal rights in the workplace, but criticized radical feminism's attempt to erase gender differences," reported Reuters news agency.

"Recent years have seen new approaches to women's issues" including a tendency "to emphasize strongly conditions of subordination in order to give rise to antagonism," it said.

The document said that many women felt they had to be "adversaries of men" in order to be themselves. The Vatican saw this as an attempt to undermine the traditional concept of family.

"Faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to seek power. This process leads to opposition between men and women ... which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family."

The document is a booklet-letter to bishops by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department in charge of safeguarding and interpreting doctrine.

This has "inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the family in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality," the document says.

Pope John Paul has repeatedly defended traditional marriage from the trend toward legalizing same-sex unions in the United States and Europe, Reuters said.

Traditional marriage and the concept of family is also essential in Islam. Eminent Muslim scholar, Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, in his book "The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam", wrote: "Marriage in Islam is a strong binding contract based on the intention of both partners to live together permanently in order to attain, as individuals, the benefit of repose, affection, and mercy mentioned in the Qur'an, as well as to attain the social goal of the reproduction and perpetuation of the human species.

After Massachusetts became in May the first state in America to permit gay marriages, the issue has been hotly debated ahead of US Presidential elections.

"Emphatically, Islam forbids homosexuality and lesbianism and regard them as a violation of the commands of God. In both the Old and the New Testaments, all Prophets of God forbid such evil activities and punish severely those who practice them," said Mohammad M. Abu Laylah, professor of Islamic Studies and Comparative Religions at Al-Azhar University.

The Vatican document further called for greater recognition of a woman's role as a mother and urged society to value it as real work.

But it also said women's access to the workplace and to positions of authority should not be limited.

"Although motherhood is a key element of women's identity, this does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation," it said.

The Vatican said women who choose to be full-time mothers should not be stigmatized, but at the same time, it appealed to governments to make it easier for mothers to hold outside jobs without "relinquishing their family life".

Among other issues, the document addresses the recurring question of whether the priesthood should be opened to women - a possibility repeatedly denied by the pope.

The document says woman's role within the Church as a witness and "bride," as exemplified by the Virgin Mary, is key but different from man's.

"The reservation of priestly ordination solely to men does not hamper in any way women's access to the heart of Christian life," it said.

The Church teaches that it cannot change the rules banning women from the priesthood because Christ chose only men as his apostles, Reuters added.