Catholic Charities
Reader Louis Epstein took the initiative to contact the staff of St. Mary Cathedral Basilica in Galveston, Texas, following Hurricane Ike to see how the mother-church of Texas Catholicism had fared. Here is the response he received:
The island is uninhabitable and the mayor has said that those who did not evacuate should leave. Basic services like water and power are not going to be restored soon.
The church had 8 feet of water and will need to be cleaned and repaired. The pastor is taking residence in Lake Charles, Louisiana and have no access to a computer. I have evacuated to Dallas and there is nobody at the church.
We have no information of when the postal service will become operational in Galveston. We do not know when we will be able to get back either. The island is in lock down.
If you would like to make a monetary donation to the church please make the check payable to St. Mary Cathedral Basilica and remit to:
Rev. Brendan Murphy
1425 N Chateau Cir
Lake Charles, LA 70605Also please add a note specifying how you would like your donation to be used. For example: to the needy or for church repair.
Please contact Rev. Brendan Murphy at (409) 370-8844
After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita there was a huge outpouring to help our Catholic brethren in those areas to recover their churches and other buildings. In times like these, a place to gather and worship, to thank God for life, to ask Him to receive those who did not survive, and to seek His guidance on how to proceed in an uncertain future is vital to a community. If you can help, please do so prayerfully.
Last year, when the Vatican issued a definitive statement that Catholic agencies were not to facilitate adoption by same-sex couples, Catholic Charities of San Francisco crafted a “compromise” that only served to compromise Catholic values and ignore the substance of the Vatican directive.
What they did was put their adoption staff and money spent on them under the umbrella of a group called Family Builders that not only facilitates adoptions by same-sex couples, but aggressively seeks them out for adoptions.
This is direct material cooperation with evil. Of course, this is not a surprise since the SF Catholic Charities executive director has been an apologist for such homosexual arrangements and is apparently dissenting from the Church’s teachings on the subject.
Now we’re getting a clearer understanding of just what kind of organization the Archdiocese of San Francisco is working with in Family Builders.
Local adoption and foster care agency Family Builders by Adoption unveiled an edgy new marketing campaign targeting LGBT people Monday, May 21 that puts a new twist on language often used by conservatives
The ads feature same-sex couples and their adopted children standing behind the slogans, “Family Planning” and “Intelligent Design.” Underneath the slogans are the phrases, “Our family was no accident – we planned for it,” and “Before we started our family we considered all the options.” The city of San Francisco paid for a portion of the ad campaign, as part of a $100,000 contract.
[…]
Supervisor Bevan Dufty spoke in support of the campaign at a news conference held Monday at the LGBT Community Center. The new interpretation of traditional right-wing phrases is expected to draw heat from conservative groups. “The religious right … only seems to care about how a child gets here, and once they’re here, they’re somebody else’s problem,” Dufty said.
Mutual love: Family Builders and CC
Technorati Tags: Catholic Charities | homosexuality | same-sex adoption | adoption | San Francisco | Vatican |
The United Way of Massachusetts Bay is changing the way it gives out money and in the process Catholic Charities gets its portion cut. United Way is a series of regional groups that organize workplace fundraisers that funnel money to a variety of charities, including, in some cases, pro-abortion groups. Now the eastern Massachusetts organization is going to redirect $3.6 million of its $34 million budget to new programs.
“The venture fund pot allows us to invest in organizations that are new for us,” said Little. “If they work, then we’ll embrace them.” If they don’t, he said, “then we’ll try something out.”
[…]
Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Boston will take a $227,000 hit, according to J. Bryan Hehir, president of the charity. Hehir said he was well aware of United Way’s plan to shift its giving strategy, but was unprepared for the size of the cut. “I didn’t have any idea of it until they talked to me today,” he said.
Last year, Catholic Charities received $1.4 million from the United Way. Of this, about $300,000 came from donors who asked specifically that their money should go to Catholic Charities. The other $1.1 million came from the United Way general fund.
But for fiscal 2008, Hehir has been told to expect $873,000 from this fund, plus whatever targeted donations come in.
Hehir worried that the funding cut would affect his agency’s program to provide emergency food aid and money to poor families. “So we’ll have to go out and raise resources for that area,” he said. But Hehir added that he still considers the United Way “a good partner to collaborate with. We’re grateful for what we’ve gotten from them and what we will get from them.”
Perhaps not so obviously, the regional United Ways are somewhat independent of their sister groups around the country. I know that some of those groups do work with problematic charities. So does anyone know if United Way of Massachusetts Bay supports organizations inimical to the mission and values of the Catholic Church? If so, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing to sever ties with them. After all, the good end of providing social services to the needy would not justify cooperating with an organization that funds evil, if in fact it does.
“San Fran. Archbishop “very happy” about plan regarding homosexual adoptions”
Speaking to a local radio station on Sunday, San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer said he is “really very happy” about a compromise plan that makes it possible for Catholic Charities adoption workers in his archdiocese to refer homosexual couples to adopt children.
Wednesday, the California Catholic Daily transcribed an on-air interview the Archbishop Niederauer gave to San Francisco’s KCBS, in which the archbishop lauded a plan which sees Catholic Charities employees working for a subsidiary of Family Builders by Adoption, an agency which provides adoptions to homosexual couples.
[...] Catholic Charities San Francisco made the decision to close its adoption services after receiving clarification from the Vatican that Catholic organizations should not take part in the adoption of children to homosexual couples. However, rather than removing itself completely from the adoption business, as its counterpart in Boston did a few months earlier, Catholic Charities San Francisco struck an agreement to pay workers who would labor for California Kids Connection, a web-referral service for the pro-homosexual-adoption Family Builders.
[...] “The most important person in the adoption is the child,” Niederauer also said. “Important as it is for couples to be able to adopt a child if they want to, it’s most important of all that the child have a home.”
But any home at all, at any cost? Let’s not forget that Pope John Paul II described the placement of a child with a homosexual or lesbian couple as a kind of spiritual or psychological violence. Yes, the most important person is the child and so we should not settle for a home in which they will be taught that sexual deviancy and immoral activity are okay.
Nancy Pelosi? That name sounds vaguely familiar
Technorati Tags:adoption, bishops, Catholic, Catholic Charities, Communion, doctrine, homosexuality, Niederauer, Pelosi, San Francisco
Nothing says freedom of religion like telling me that I have to pay for someone else’s birth control pills when my beliefs say this it is immoral. New York’s highest court has ruled that Catholic organizations must provide contraceptive coverage to all employees under a state law. The court has narrowly defined a religious employer exemption as applying only to groups with a specifically “religious” mission, by which they mean performing acts of worship. Regardless of whether as Catholics we believe that providing charity to the poor is a religious imperative, Catholic Charities and Catholic hospitals and the like don’t qualify.
Seems to me that if the First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” then telling religious organizations what they can consider to be part of their religious mission as well as what their religion is allowed to include.
The New York law does exempt some entities from having to comply with the prescription drug-coverage mandate. The [sic] include churches, seminaries and other institutions with a mainly religious mission.
But groups such as Catholic Charities of Albany, which sought to overturn the law, weren’t exempted because their missions weren’t deemed to be religious.
This is just the precursor to stripping away our other First Amendment rights too, when we’re told we can’t criticize “protected” groups like homosexuals and that the Church must perform same-sex marriages. Don’t believe it can happen? That’s what our friends in Canada thought.
I hope they pursue it to the Supreme Court and whatever happens they don’t just capitulate like the Catholic institutions did in California when they agreed to cooperate with evil and pay for the pills.
Technorati Tags:Catholic, contraception, courts, First Amendment, New York, prescription, religious freedom
