The pope has stepped up the fight against marriage equality, saying gay people are destroying humanity.

Benedict XVI made the comments in his annual Christmas speech to the Vatican bureaucracy, one of the most important speeches of the year.

He dedicated it this year to promoting ‘family values’ in the face of marriage equality campaigns in France, United States, and the United Kingdom.

In his remarks, the leader of the Catholic Church quoted the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, in saying the campaign for granting gay people the right to marry and adopt children was an ‘attack’ on the ‘traditional’ family.

‘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,’ the pope said.

‘They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.’

The German leader said gay and trans people were ‘manipulating their God-given gender to suit their sexual choice’ and destroying the ‘very essence of the human creature’ in the process.’

He added: ‘The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned.’

This week, the Roman Catholic newspaper L’Osservatore Romano printed an official report from the Vatican which said gays were living in a ‘different reality’ if they thought they could ever achieve the ‘false utopia’ of marriage equality.

In his recently released annual peace message, the pope said gay marriage, like abortion and euthanasia, was a threat to world peace.

After the peace message was released last week, gay activists staged a small peaceful protest in St. Peter’s Square.