Brian Cahill, of San Francisco Catholic Charities CYO, couldn’t be more pleased now that his group has found a way to stay in the adoption business.
Earlier this year, the Vatican announced Catholic Charities could not longer pair children with adoptive same-sex parents.
"Fortunately though our new archbishop did not say shut it down," Cahill said. "He said find a way to continue to serve these children and at the same time not contravene church teaching."
So the solution approved by San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer was for Catholic Charities to team up with California Kids Connection, an Oakland-based adoption network.
Even though California Kids does work with same-sex couples, Catholic Charities feels it can help because that’s all it’s doing – helping – not actually finalizing the adoptions.
"We would see ourselves as educating, informing, linking, and then we’re going to try to recruit parents," Cahill said. "We simply will not be, for reasons that we mentioned, doing the direct work."
Jill Jacobs, California Kids Connection Executive Director, says the match will work: "We’re not being asked nor pushed to compromise any of our principles or values."
Next month, Catholic Charities will send three paid staff members to California Kids to work to match up families and foster children.
California Kids could use the help, according to Jacobs.
"Last year this program was responsible for 200 children finding permanent families and we hope the first year to double or triple that and we think after that it will be even greater," Jacobs said.
The solution seems to have been a way to keep all sides happy, including proponents of same-sex parents.
Something is quite backwards when it is the director of an adoption agency that works with same sex couples is the one to say "We’re not being asked nor pushed to compromise any of our principles or values" and the director of Catholic Charities in San Francisco is almost gleeful in finding a seeming loophole.
In contrast, San Francisco’s Catholic Charities will assign three staff members to work with California Kids Connection, a nonprofit statewide organization that compiles an Internet database of children available for adoption and assists with adoption referrals. The staff will help all prospective parents, including gays and lesbians, Cahill said. If that work ultimately leads to a match between a gay parent and a foster child, that is fine, he said.
“God loves them all," he said.
Not being a moral theologian I wonder what others might make of this statement?
When asked if the new plan still puts Catholic Charities in a position of assisting with gay adoptions, San Francisco Archbishop George H. Niederauer said he thought it was a form of potential “remote" cooperation that does not conflict with Catholic moral teaching. He said he has consulted his predecessor, Cardinal William Levada , the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, on this plan.
I am sure the question of whether this comes into the category of remote material cooperation is debatable. The German bishops use to be involved in a government program where they would give counseling for women considering abortion. They were not promoting abortion, but were involved in a process where a women could get an abortion. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger was finally able to end this process which it seems the majority of the German bishops endorsed. This situation seems similar to this situation and that the material cooperation is not just remote.
There is also another component of cooperation and that is moral cooperation. The current and passed statements of the Director of Catholic Charities in San Francisco show that he morally supports this grave sin. Even if an act truly entail remote cooperation it is still sinful if the person morally cooperates with the end. Mr. Cahill should be removed from Catholic Charities immediately. Since this has not been done it is hard to take seriously a good faith attitude by the diocese. It appears more like seeking a loophole than an attempt at diligently defending the faith.
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Notice how the article never mentions what Levada’s response was.
Drive out the inhabitants. Burn the city to the ground. Salt the land.
Repeat steps 1-3 until problem is solved.
That’s it. As of today, I am no longer a contributor to Catholic Charities. I refuse to support any chapter of this organization.
This is an end-run worthy of Notre Dame’s glory days of football. These billious and bogus remarks could only be made by people who want to facilitate adoptions by gay couples.
I am disgusted and disappointed beyond expression or endurance. The Archbishop of San Fransico should be stopping this, not approving it.
Earlier this year, the Vatican announced Catholic Charities could not longer pair children with adoptive same-sex parents.
“Fortunately though our new archbishop did not say shut it down,” Cahill said.
Different pope. Same schizophrenia.
So the solution approved by San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer was for…
Didn’t Pope Benedict *just* appoint this guy? Why was he so negligent? By what right does our shepherd have to feed his sheep to the wolves?
“We would see ourselves as educating, informing, linking, and then we’re going to try to recruit parents,” Cahill said. “We simply will not be, for reasons that we mentioned, doing the direct work.”
“We see ourselves as educating, informing, linking, and then we’re going to try to recruit Romans,” Caiaphas said. “We simply will not be, for reasons that we mentioned, doing the direct work.”
Once again, the Social Gospel trumps Catholic doctrine. If you have to rationalize the practice to that degree, something is wrong.
While the ploughing-salt-into-the-ground idea is attractive, there is a certain utility in keeping all the wackos out there. If we drive them out, burn the city, and salt the earth, some of the weirdos out there might come here. I’ve been there… and they got weirdos out there that the people of my region cannot even conceive of. The knowledge would blast the sanity and reason from their minds.
Of course, if it continues to be a sort of mecca for mutants, and they continue to flock there… and then the Big One happens, they’ll whine that it wast the fault of the rest of us since it “disproportionately affected the weirdo-american community”.
As for Catholic Charities, I’m afraid I have to agree with Paul. As with the colleges and universities, its time to throw them out and start over.
I’m no moral theologian, but it sure seems to me that they are positively remotely cooperating in evil. If we substitute the words “children” for “johns” and “parents” for “prostitutes”, Catholic Charities would be considered pimping. Of course, they would argue that they can’t be responsible if their clients do something immoral after they’ve been hooked up. As I said at another blog, they may as well be finding young pregnant women to send to Planned Parenthood for “health care”.
A friend of mine has a doctorate in Catholic Moral Theology. We were arguing about something recently, and what her point finally came down to is that there are some things that are allowed, given the principle of double effect, if they are not the directly intended action.
I replied by saying that in the case at hand (what we were discussing) there seem to be degrees of indirectness in these situations.
I wish I could be clearer, but it seems relevant to this case. When a child e.g. says to his / her mom “It’s not my fault. I didn’t mean to!” then there are usually different kinds of “didn’t mean to.” There’s
-I didn’t mean to break it, I was being careful, but something happened to distract me
-I didn’t mean to break it but I was careless
-I didn’t mean to break it but I was trying to see how high it could bounce
-I didn’t mean to break it necessarily but I’m glad it’s broken
-I’ll say I didn’t mean to break it but I’m lying because really I was trying to because it’s my sister’s and I’m mad at her right now
Anyhow what she said was really interesting. She said that moral theologians, in the journals and books, don’t discuss degrees of indirectness. She said the subject just doesn’t come up, that basically actions are considered either to be intended or unintended, and that’s all they count.
(Actually now I realize that the SF situation is about remoteness rather than intention. Never mind!)
Man, when the city of San Francisco came out with that declaration blasting LeVada and calling the Vatican a hostile foreign power, I was so proud of my Church!
According to Catholic theology, putting a child in the care of a homosexual couple “does VIOLENCE to that child”. If the word “violence” is understood correctly, how can remoteness even possibly be an excuse in this situation? Stand up for what we believe in, guys!
It seems the more strongly worded a teaching is, the more likely a very visible member of the Church hierarchy is to publicly flaunt that.
How absolutely demoralizing.
Here is the article about the declaration:
http://www.thomasmore.org/news.html?NewsID=410
To speak with Catholic Charities CYO Executive Director, Brian Cahill,
contact Patricia Evans at 415.972.1295 or pevans@cccyo.org.
To speak with Archbishop Niederauer,
contact Maurice Healy at the SF Archdiocese at 415.614.5636 or healym@sfarchdiocese.org.
This is the kind of thinking that is refered to in moral theology as ‘making it up as you go along’. I can’t imagine how this would qualify as remote cooperation.
So, if I am a pregnant woman in crisis seeking to put my baby up for adoption, what parts of Catholicism will be adhered to when I go to Catholic Charities these days? I know my baby will possibly go without a mother or father, depending on which gender the same sex parents are. If my ultrasound shows a disability, will Catholic Charities give encouragement (but of course in a remote sort of way) towards my aborting the baby?
Wouldn’t I, having successfully gotten past the Planned Parenthood abortion mill, arriving to the conclusion that my baby should live, reaching for a door marked “Catholic” have the expectation that these people did Catholic things?
We’re speaking much on the disservice to these babies, but what about these poor women? Don’t they deserve the peace of mind that the parents they sought for the child they loved so much to continue their lives — complete with both a mommy AND a daddy — would assuredly be there because of our Catholic teaching?
Check out my blog. I liken it to refusing to operate the shelters of Dachua and Auschwitz in WWII Germany due to immoral things happening but still driving the trains that take people to these places so that people can find shelter.
Teresa – presumably the birthmother would be able to choose the baby’s new parents by looking at profiles and so forth; it’s not like babies are just taken and given to the next in line, with the birthmother none the wiser. Once upon a time it was done like that, but not now. The fundamental problem remains, of course.
Niederauer is frustrating – every now and then he can really hit one out of the park (in a good way) but when it comes to abortion … squish!
Check out Diogenes at “offtherecord”
maintaining ritual purity
“If it’s wrong for me, it’s wrong for you; and it’s wrong for you to encourage someone else to do something that you know is wrong. You can’t get off the hook by claiming you didn’t participate in the act”
In simple language, they haven’t “found a way to stay in the adoption business”; they’ve found a way to stay in the business of supplying children to homosexual households. The whole operation is similar to laundering money; it doesn’t travel directly, but it gets from point A to point B anyway.
I’ll vote for the burning and salting.
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It’s worse than you think. Catholic Charities San Francisco is partnering with California Kids Connection that is “coordinated by” Family Builders by Adoption, which has this to say on its website: “At Family Builders By Adoption, we take pride in the fact that almost half of the families we work with are LGBT [lesbian gay bisexual transgendered] families.” The head of this organization is a lobbyist for non-straight married couple adoptions. http://www.familybuilders.org/gay3.html.
If this kind of cooperation is considered remote, so is this: Doctor: “I don’t do abortions, but my colleague next door where three of my employees work does; don’t forget to say I gave you the referral.”
The shocking thing is that this move was, so it is reported, OKed by Cardinal Levada. Are we deep into casuistry here?
As I see it Catholic Charities no longer deserves to be called Catholic! They seem to be in bed with the sodomites.
This is TOTAL FREAKING IDIOCY. As an adoptive parent, I can tell you that THERE AREN’T ANY KIDS TO ADOPT. THEY’VE ALL BEEN KILLED!
Sorry. I got carried away. I spent about $40,000 and travelled to Russia to get my little angel. Nothing was available in the US.
This makes “This Week in the Theocracy” for sure.
Teresa,
THERE IS NO ^%&*%&^$@& LACK OF PROSPECTIVE ADOPTIVE PARENTS.
Sorry. This is really ticking me off.
When you call Niederauer’s office to complain about his complicity in shoving innocent children into sodomite dens, please also mention you will no longer put
as much as one cent in any collection basket in his diocese.
KT Cat
Yes, I have some family members who have expressed the very same thing. In our case, they have gone to China.
I think the point I was trying to make (sorry if I didn’t do it well) was telling women who want to give their babies to adoptive parents that a same sex couple is equivalent to a potential mother and a father couple is more than just faulty thinking.
I believe it maintains the illness that got this woman in crisis in the first place: a truncated relationship between woman and man. Why would anyone promote (which, after accepting same sex couples, the next step is promotion) that a pregnant woman seek a same sex couple? If they are in a crisis pregnancy they are already in a single sex situation.
If the pool of orphans is not available in the U.S., will/do same sex couples demand to be considered as prospective parents overseas?
If that is the case, I can imagine that this has potential to hamper the efforts of married women and men seeking adoption there too, especially in view of all Western nation’s hearty propoganda that homosexual relationships are just the same as hetrosexual ones.
Teresa, I’m very sorry I misread your post. I apologize.
There are thousands of children in this country waiting to have a permanent family and at least one parent of their very own, who are not being adopted. Where are all the supposed eager prospective adoptive parents?
Of course, these are not single physically-perfect infants. They are sibling groups. Toddlers, school-aged kids, teenagers. Have ongoing relationships with relatives. Been through too many foster placements. Physically handicapped, developmentally disabled, ADHD, PTSD, etc. So the mythical “eager prospective adoptive parents” don’t want them, and go help China rid itself of its unwanted girl babies, or to one of the other countries that exchange uncomplicated healthy newborns for some foreign exchange…..
The real solution is for good Catholic married heterosexual couples to eagerly adopt available United States children.
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