"gayest adoption agency in the country"

Catholic News Agency has a good overview of Catholic Charity of San Francisco alliance with Family Builders for adoptions. Jill Jacobs, executive director of Family Builders in the article told the Bay Area Reporter that, “We’re about the gayest adoption agency in the country."

…“I ask myself, ‘How is this not supporting homosexual adoption?’” Vivian Dudro, a San Francisco resident, told CNA. Dudro, who has lived with her husband and four children in the area for the last ten years, says that her family has given to Catholic Charities through parish appeals nearly annually.

“When I found out that these adoptions had already been occurring I felt betrayed. Now I learn that (Catholic Charities employees) are going to continue to assist in placing children into the hands of homosexual couples and I just wonder, ‘What is going on? How is the Church’s teaching not clear?’”

Vivian, who works full time raising her children, is not alone in her confusion. Several moral theologians, familiar with Church teaching on the issue, are also unclear as to how the Catholic organization is rationalizing their participation. Dr. William May, a professor at the John Paul II Institute for the Study of Family and Marriage, told CNA that he’s not sure why Catholic Charities thinks they are not acting contrary to the Church’s teaching.

“I find it difficult to reconcile the actions of Catholic Charities of San Francisco with the 2003 document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” May said.

Dr. May pointed to a paragraph of the document which considers the fact that homosexual unions lack in both the biological and anthropological elements that make up a marriage. The CDF document states that children should not be placed into such a situation. “As experience has shown, the absence of sexual complementarity in these unions creates obstacles in the normal development of children who would be placed in the care of such persons,” it says. “They would be deprived of the experience of either fatherhood or motherhood.” In other words, the best environment for raising children involves a mother and a father.

The document continues, “Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development.”

Such actions, the Vatican says, are “gravely immoral and in open contradiction to the principle, recognized also in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that the best interests of the child, as the weaker and more vulnerable party, are to be the paramount consideration in every case.”

May also pointed to a paragraph of the document which discusses what action individual Catholics and Church organizations should take in situations, such as the ones which exist in Boston and San Francisco, in which governments recognize homosexual partnerships as equal to marriage. The document states that in such situations, “clear and emphatic opposition is a duty.”

What is more, the document says that, “One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application.”

I hope that this won’t be the last word on the subject especially being that this is Bishop Levada (Now prefect of the CDFs) last See. It is pretty hard to see how this is not formal material cooperation instead of it being just remote material cooperation.

…Cahill repeated his views in the Bay Area Reporter this week saying that adoption to homosexual couples has never been an issue for his staff. “It only came onto the radar after it became an issue in Rome,” he said.

“We should be praising (those adopting) regardless of sexual orientation and thanking them for what they are doing.”

Under the new agreement, Cahill said, his staff will, in the end, do more of what they want to do. “It’s impossible not to use the word ‘irony’ in this situation,” he remarked, “Out of what could have been a crisis came a great opportunity. We actually are going to increase our role in adoptions. And working with Family Builders will actually help them double and triple the number of kids who are up on their Web site.”

The Catholic Charities partnership may even result in more LGBT families adopting children than before, the Bay Area Reporter said.

That the directory of Catholic Charities has no problem saying this out in the open is a serious indicator of problems in the diocese.

…Reconciling questions such as Dudro’s will ultimately be the task Archbishop Niederauer. The archbishop is officially the Chairman of the Board of San Francisco Catholic Charities. However, Cahill has praised the Archbishop for his “hand’s off” approach to the decision.

Though not everybody is thrilled about the hand’s off approach.

“It seems that the leadership of the Archdiocese decided that they were willing to sacrifice the children and the lay faithful in the pews so as not to earn the displeasure of the politically powerful in this city,” Dudro said.

“It’s as if political power and money have overshadowed the Truth of the Church’s teaching.”

Unfortunately this is about exactly what was expected by many pundits when Archbishop Niederauer was announced as Archbishop Levada’s replacement. When he was the Archbishop of Salt Lake City he was praised by many homosexual organizations for his views which appeared to oppose the document on accepting homosexual’s to the priesthood. He also In 2004 publicly opposed a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage that appeared on the Utah state ballot, even though he opposed same-sex marriage. How he has so far handled the Catholic Charities fiasco seems to be an indicator that not much has changed. For his statements and actions Mr. Cahill needs to be dismissed and if this doesn’t happen than the Archbishop might be more of a politician than a shepherd. Please pray for the Archbishop. Being a bishop is a responsibility that I can only dimly imagine the strain of and being one in a Archdiocese such as San Francisco could make a man request a transfer to Sodom and Gomorrah as a cushier job.