VATICAN CITY - The Pope has pressed his opposition to gay marriage, denouncing what he describes as people eschewing their God-given gender identities to suit their sexual choices and destroying the very "essence of the human creature" in the process.
Benedict XVI made the comments in his annual Christmas address to the Vatican bureaucracy on Friday, one of his most important speeches of the year.
He dedicated it this year to promoting traditional family values in the face of gains by same-sex marriage proponents in the US and Europe and efforts to legalise gay marriage in places such as France and Britain.
"People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being," he said.
"They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.
"The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he himself is concerned."
It was the second time in a week that Benedict commented on gay marriage, which is currently dividing France, and which scored big electoral wins in the US last month.
In his recently released annual peace message, Benedict said gay marriage, like abortion and euthanasia, was a threat to world peace.
The Vatican went on a similar anti-gay marriage media blitz last month after three US states approved gay marriage by popular vote.
After the peace message was released last week, gay activists staged a small protest in St Peter's Square. Italy's main gay rights group, Arcigay, called the Pope's comments "absurd, dangerous and totally out of synch with reality".
And a coalition of four US Catholic organisations representing gay, lesbian and transgender people said the Pope had an "outmoded" view of what it means to be man and woman.
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