Catholic Charities
San Fran Catholic Charities supporting moral violence to children
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 |
United Way cuts funds to Catholic Charities
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.
Two from San Fran. Archbishop Niederauer
“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
So much for freedom of religion
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
Bush mentions Catholic schools, Catholic Charities in New Orleans
President Bush, in New Orleans yesterday for the Katrina anniversary, spoke about the recovery, clean-up, and the importance of several institutions, including the Catholic Church. The president praised both Catholic Charities and the Catholic school system.
The New Orleans school system is enriched by the religious schools here. And the Cathedral Academy has been educating in New Orleans for nearly three decades. There’s an interesting story I’m about to tell you. Last October, Cathedral Academy became the first school to re-open. That was last October. Sister Mary Rose is the principal, and she believes this: No child would be turned away from her school’s front door.
For 10-year-old Aalilyah Carr, who is with us today here, the return to school was a day she will never forget. I love what she said—she said, “I was so happy I could hear the choir singing in my head. It was a long time before I thought I’d see a school again, and I’m so glad to be walking these halls.” Aalilyah says it better than I can. Education is the gateway to a brighter future. Education provides the light of hope for a young generation of children.
It’s really important—I look forward to working with the federal government to provide opportunity scholarships for the poorest of our families so they have a choice as to whether they go to a religious school or a public school. It’s good for New Orleans to have competing school systems. It’s good for our country to have a vibrant parochial school system. And I applaud those who are very much involved with the Catholic school system here in the great city of New Orleans.
Sounds great, but you know that the ACLU and the NEA are right now trying to find a way to counteract the influence of the Catholic system. Yes, parochial systems provide vital competition and what’s amazing is that they are competitive despite the fact that the alternative is free. Think of that. Imagine that you were a butcher, say, and the meat you sold was of a superior quality, but that your competition was taxpayer-funded and gave his inferior meat away for free. How long do you think you would stay in business? How bad would the competitor’s product have to be for people to still come to you?
Catholic Charities
Technorati Tags:Bush, Catholic, Catholic Charities, Katrina, New Orleans, school
Catholic Charities SF does sleight-of-hand trick with gay adoptions
At first you might think that Catholic Charities of San Francisco is standing on principle and ending its practice of providing adoptions for gays.
Five months after Catholic Charities in Boston decided to pull out of the adoption business to avoid placing children with gay couples, its affiliated agency in San Francisco announced yesterday it was also ending its work as a full adoption agency because of the controversy.
``We are not continuing to do direct placements,” said Brian Cahill, executive director of Catholic Charities of San Francisco, in a telephone interview.
But wait a minute. Something’s not right. On March 17, Archbishop George Niederauer of San Francisco announced that Catholic Charities in his archdiocese would stop the practice. How could the archbishop order the end of gay adoptions five months ago and the head of Catholic Charities say that they decided only yesterday? Because Catholic Charities, specifically Brian Cahill, is not under the archbishop’s control.
Back then Cahill said that Niederauer didn’t say what he clearly said and even started a public fight with the archbishop’s spokesman over it: “This is an outright statement that is false,” Cahill said of Healy’s assertion. “Mr. Healy is, A, mistaken, B, doesn’t speak for Catholic Charities and, frankly, it’s clear to me that he’s not speaking for the archbishop these days.” Of course, as I pointed out, Cahill himself has an adult gay son who adopted a child four years ago with his boyfriend and Cahill has praised gay families in print. He has appointed an openly gay man to a senior post at Catholic Charities and many members of the board of Catholic Charities are openly gay and lesbian.
But Cahill’s statement yesterday must be an indicator of a change of heart, right? Not necessarily.
Technorati Tags:adoption, Catholic, Catholic Charities, dissent, homosexuality
In the Forum: Is Catholic Charities USA Catholic?
In the Bettnet Discussion Forum, Isabelle asks Is Catholic Charities USA Catholic?
Are they an official charity of the Catholic Church or an affiliate ? Are they merely secular with the Name “Catholic”. ... If anyone can give me information about this organization (Catholic Charities USA) and it’s official connection with the Catholic Church, I would be very grateful.
Technorati Tags: Catholic, Catholic Charities
Gay marriage leads to end of our religious liberty
Catholic Charities of Boston ending its historic service of facilitating adoption for the neediest kids because it wouldn’t allow gays to adopt them is the result of Massachusetts’ creation of the fiction called “gay marriage.” So says, Maggie Gallagher in a Weekly Standard article entitled “Banned in Boston.” (Did you catch the pun? Know what marriage banns are? Esoteric, I know.)
Gallagher starts off by quoting people on all sides as saying that the Church’s working at providing adoption services was good and that ending it was bad. But everyone disagrees on why it happened. The pro-gay side says the bishops put a political agenda ahead of the children. The Church says that you cannot do evil that good may result and that placing children with gay adoptive parents does spiritual (and perhaps other kinds of) violence to them. But Gallagher says that what is being missed is the connection to gay marriage. Gay activists said supporters of traditional marriage shouldn’t care about gay marriage because it won’t affect them or change their lives in any way. Really?
Just how serious are the coming conflicts over religious liberty stemming from gay marriage? “The impact will be severe and pervasive,” Picarello says flatly. “This is going to affect every aspect of church-state relations.”
... In times of relative peace, says Picarello, people don’t even notice that “the church is surrounded on all sides by the state; that church and state butt up against each other. The boundaries are usually peaceful, so it’s easy sometimes to forget they are there. But because marriage affects just about every area of the law, gay marriage is going to create a point of conflict at every point around the perimeter.”
Sexual liberty trumps religious liberty
Technorati Tags: gay marriage, homosexuality, religious freedom, same-sex marriage
Reaching high
Continuing his recent string of unprecedented access to the media, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston gives an interview to the Boston Globe. I’ll give him credit for being proactive with the media. I’ve been telling everyone I could get my hands on in this archdiocese that the Church should stop simply reacting to stories, but when it sees something happening that will likely be in the media, to be the first one out of the gate on it, to frame the story as it forms. Maybe they’re finally getting that idea.
Among his remarks he said he has an expansive view of who is Catholic in the archdiocese, including those who only return to Church on big holidays like Easter and Christmas. Certainly that’s not at odds with the Church’s teaching. Failing your Sunday obligation may be a mortal sin, but it doesn’t make you not a Catholic.
He also said that there is a big evangelization push planned for 2008 to coincide with the archdiocese’s bicentennial (finally, evangelization!) and acknowledged that dissent is a big problem. (Ya think?)
Plenty of tidbits in the transcript
Technorati Tags: Boston, cardinal, Catholic, finances
Volunteer of the year
Catholic Charities USA has named its lists of finalists for National Volunteer of the Year. This is the sort of thing I would look at and say, “How nice for them,” and move on. But then one of the finalists’ names has been brought to my attention.
Clint Reilly is the president of the board of Catholic Charities San Francisco. His accomplishments as recorded in the news release appear primarily to fall in the realm of fundraising. Meanwhile, his wife, Janet Reilly, is running for the California state Assembly. Would you care to guess her position on gay adoptions facilitated by Catholic Charities?
”Like the majority of Catholics...” Thankfully, the Catholic Church is not a democracy and never will be. It is a monarchy with our monarch as Christ the King.Like the majority of Catholics, I believe the number one factor in adoption should be finding safe and loving homes for our children. For me, the choice is clear – we should put our children first by continuing the long time practices of Catholic Charities of placing children with any stable and loving household. To do otherwise, would be to discriminate against gay and lesbian Americans and it would also punish our children, many of whom are languishing in the foster care system.
Catholic Charities is an organization that works to find permanent homes for the hardest-to-place cases: preteen children, teenagers and the disabled. This fulfils a critical community need and one we cannot afford to lose.
Unlike the Archdiocese of Boston, which has now ended their adoption services, Catholic Charities in the Bay Area has not changed its position on adoption, and I hope they never will.
And kudos to “Fr. Francis” who posts in her comment box links to Courage and the Catholic Medical Association for information on the Church’s teaching on homosexuality.
So, I’m not saying that this is what Clint Reilly believes. He and his wife may disagree. But what are the odds of it? And what message does it send to consider him for volunteer of the year with this cloud hanging over him?
Technorati Tags: adoption, Catholic Charities, homosexuality
1st Amendment lawsuit against San Francisco
A few weeks ago the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution condemning the Vatican as a “foreign country” that “meddles with and attempts to negatively influence” the SF archdiocese in ending the practice of gay adoptions by Catholic Charities.
At the time I said I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the ACLU to jump in on this blatant violation of the First Amendment freedom of religion. Thankfully, we Catholics have our own public-interest law firm. The Thomas More Law Center has filed a federal lawsuit against San Francisco on behalf of William Donohue’s Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights and two San Francisco Catholics.
According to the press release, which I have just received:
The lawsuit, brought on behalf of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and two San Francisco Catholic citizens, challenges the anti-Catholic resolution as a “startling attack by government officials on the Catholic Church, Catholic moral teaching and beliefs, and those who adhere to the tenets of the Catholic faith, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.”
Faithful Catholics Not Welcomed
Technorati Tags: adoption, anti-Catholic, Catholic Charities, homosexuality, religious freedom, San Francisco
Globe radically inflates number of children with gay parents
I vaguely recall a while back blogging about someone’s statistics that claimed millions of gay households in the US and then having looked up the background data finding out that the report completely and artificially inflated the number. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the exact posting or find it in my archives.
What brings it to mind is a recent posting by Harry Forbes at Squaring the Globe in which he finds the Boston Globe doing the same thing in a story about same-sex adoption. The story claims that “forty percent of same-sex couples aged 22 to 55 are raising children, about 5 percent of whom are adopted,” and that “up to 10 million children are estimated to have a lesbian or gay parent.” So Harry decided to check out those claims in the survey the Globe claimed as its source.
First, he looks at the CIA World Factbook, which tells him that the US has 60 million kids under the age of 15. I looked at the US Census data and it says there are 79 million kids under the age for 18. So the Globe claims that 1 in 8 kids in the country under the age of 18 have at least one gay or lesbian parent. Harry uses the lower under-15 number to come up with 1 in 6. Either way, that’s very doubtful.
But it’s when he goes right to the report, it says not 10 million children, but 250,000.
Same-sex couples in the United States are raising approximately 250,000 children.
Many same-sex couples in the United States are raising children. The Gay and Lesbian Atlas finds that same-sex couples were raising approximately 250,000 children under age 18 in 1999.[17]
Gee, why would the Boston Globe have any reason to over-inflate (by a factor of 40!) the number of children living in gay or lesbian households? What could have been happening in the news recently related to this?
Technorati Tags: adoption, Boston, Catholic Charities, homosexuality, media bias
Ideology trumps charity in liberal San Francisco
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders takes the city’s Board of Supervisors to task for forcing their own ideology on the Catholic Church as the price of doing charitable works there. The board has forced the Archdiocese of San Francisco to compromise on Catholic doctrine in the past and is doing so again with regard to Catholic Charities and gay adoptions. Unfortunately, there are people within Catholic Charities and the archdiocese who are all too willing to cooperate with the board in forcing that renunciation of doctrine.
Referring to Brian Cahill, director of SF Catholic Charities, she writes:
Catholic Charities in Boston announced it will get out of the adoption business rather than violate state laws that forbid discrimination against gays and lesbians. Gay advocates won a political victory—and unwanted children will pay the price.
In the Bay Area, Catholic Charities has announced no such change in its policy. The group sent out a statement that said it “will continue to serve the best interests of vulnerable children who need loving homes—either the way we have been—or in a new creative way.”
Beware: “creative” is Church Latin for “cave.”
Yes, Catholic Charities was “creative” in just that way back in 1996.
Renounce your faith to get our funding
Technorati Tags: adoption, Catholic, Catholic-bashing, Catholic Charities, homosexuality, politics, San Francisco
SF Supervisors resist the foreign invasion
How is this not a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state as defined by current Supreme Court precedent? “San Francisco Supervisors slam Vatican on adoptions, Resolution calls edict on gays ‘insulting, callous’”
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors wasted little time chiming in, and challenged local church officials to defy the Vatican. “It is an insult to all San Franciscans when a foreign country, like the Vatican, meddles with and attempts to negatively influence this great city’s existing and established customs and traditions, such as the right of same-sex couples to adopt and care for children in need,” the resolution stated.
Suddenly the Catholic Church is not a church, but a foreign country. I’m going to hold my breath until the ACLU jumps in. Shouldn’t take long. I won’t turn blue first.
I like the statement that gays adopting kids is an “existing and established custom and tradition.” How old is that, about 20 years? Compare that to the Catholic Church’s 2,000-year-old traditions and customs about morality and family, themselves based on Jewish customs and traditions dating back a further 3,000-5,000 years.
Narcissus, your office is calling.
Technorati Tags: adoption, anti-Catholic, Catholic, Catholic-bashing, Catholic-Charities, homosexuality, San Francisco
Another non-Catholic defender of the Church
So far in the past three weeks, we’ve had three (female) Catholic opinion columnists publishing in Boston’s two major newspapers full-throated screeds against the Church for daring to claim to teach immutable truth. On the other hand, the strongest defense of the Church has come from two non-Catholic male columnists. I noted Jeff Jacoby last week, and yesterday it was Joe Fitzgerald in the Boston Herald. (Subscriber only, sorry.)
Joe’s not Catholic, but he’s a friend to the Church and her teaching. He takes a very strong tack against the “hypocrites” who are attacking the Catholic Church.
Isn’t it odd that those who’ve long clamored for the church to be separated from the state now claim to be offended when the former refuses to be governed by the latter?
Hypocrisy is nothing new to this crowd, but surely this takes the cake.
The Catholic Church, in its understanding of Biblical injunctions, announced it will not sponsor or sanction the adopting of children by homosexual couples. There’s nothing complicated about that position.
Hypocrites quickly forgave Clinton, but not the Church
Technorati Tags: adoption, Boston, Catholic, dissent, doctrine, homosexuality, media
