A commenter on a previous post alerted me to this story. It wasn’t three Boston Catholic Charities board members who resigned over the decision by Massachusetts’ bishops to seek an exemption to a state law requiring they participate in gay adoptions. Actually it was seven members who resigned.
In a statement, the seven board members said they were “deeply troubled” by the course set by the four bishops, and said it “undermines our moral priority of helping vulnerable children find loving homes. ... The course the Bishops have charted threatens the very essence of our Christian mission. For the sake of the poor we serve, we pray they will reconsider.”
It’s not that the bishops are even saying no to any adoptions, just that they want the permission of the government to say no to gay adoptions. This is very mild request, yet see the extremity of their response.
This isn’t an esoteric element of Catholic teaching we’re dealing with here. It’s a very public and well-known moral teaching regarding human sexuality that’s been much discussed in the past several decades. They can’t claim that this snuck up on them. Plus it’s interesting that they seem to think the Church’s mission is to act as a social services agency, not as a witness to Truth. They seem to believe that temporal goods are more important than eternal salvation.
The magnificent seven
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