Last week, Archbishop George Niederauer of San Francisco announced that his Catholic Charities would stop performing gay adoptions. This followed an email from his predecessor and the current head of the CDF, Archbishop William Levada, telling him it should stop. Levada had allowed the practice when he was archbishop, despite the Vatican’s insistence that putting children into these situations is a form of spiritual violence. So gay adoptions will stop, right?
Not necessarily. It seems Brian Cahill, executive director of CC SF, says that Niederauer’s clear statement isn’t so clear and that it doesn’t explicitly ban gay adoptions.
Here’s what Niederauer said: “We fully accept and faithfully teach what the Catholic Church teaches on marriage and family life. In light of these convictions, we currently are reviewing our adoption programs to determine concretely how we can continue to best serve children who are so much in need of a home.” If all Niederauer said was the second sentence, Cahill could make an argument. But the first sentence is the stopper. Church teaching on gay adoption is clear and if you fully accept it, then you won’t do it. Even the archdiocesan spokesman, Maurice Healy, says it: “These kinds of adoptions are not in sync with church teaching, and we’ve committed ourselves to being in sync with church teaching.” (Nice of a Catholic archdiocese to commit to being in sync with Church teaching; Remember a time when such an idea would be taken for granted?)
But Cahill says Healy is wrong.
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