San Francisco Catholic Adoption Staff to Work With Gay Friendly Agency

Excerpted from San Francisco Catholic Adoption Staff to Work With Gay Friendly Agency, by Hilary White, published Aug 8, 2006, by LifeSite News:

The Boston Globe reports that five months after Boston Catholic Charities removed itself from adoption services after pressure from homosexual activists, San Francisco Catholic Charities has found a compromise in handling cases of adoption of children to homosexual partners. In March this year, San Francisco Catholic Charities announced that it would be “reviewing” its procedures in regards to adoption to homosexuals in light of the shut-down of the Boston agency’s 103 year-old adoption work.

Brian Cahill, the head of the diocesan-funded Charities, told the Globe that three staff members will be working with a non-profit adoption agency, California Kids Connection, that has no moral qualms about placing children in homosexual households.

San Francisco Catholic Charities announced on August 2, that the compromise had been provisionally approved by San Francisco’s Archbishop Niederauer.

The Catholic Charities of San Francisco has long been criticized by faithful Catholics for its eagerness to cooperate with the homosexual movement. It was revealed in March of this year that the director of programs and services of San Francisco’s Catholic Charities is an openly gay man who adopted a daughter four years ago with his homosexual partner.

Glen Metola admitted that his homosexuality and his status as an adoptive father were well known at the agency.

Cahill said he believes this compromise with what the Vatican sees as a “grave evil” will be in keeping with Catholic directives not to be “directly involved in the placement” of a child in a gay household.

Archbishop Niederauer told the Globe that he believed sending Catholic Charities employees to help homosexuals adopt children was a matter of “remote cooperation,” with what the Vatican has identified as the “violence” done to children who are adopted by homosexual partners.

Niederauer said that he had consulted with former San Francisco Archbishop, now Cardinal, William Levada, currently the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in the matter.

The pseudonymous blogger at Catholic World News, Diogenes, was unimpressed: “Cahill’s understanding of Church teaching is childish– to the point of incoherence. Is it wrong only for a Catholic to do violence against children, and morally neutral for someone outside the faith? Impossible. 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.”

The CDF, the Catholic Church’s highest authority on matters of faith and morals after the Pope, has already ruled on the issue however, saying that allowing children to be adopted by homosexual couples places them in danger. A 2003 statement from the CDF, then under the leadership of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, said that homosexual adoptions “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.”