“Totally unsuitable partner"

San Francisco Catholic Charities cutting ties with “gayest adoption agency in the country”

Full article…

This is disappointing. :frowning: This is a loss of many good hearted couples who would make a great home for children of adoption. I hope Catholic Charities reconsiders in the future.

I find it hard to justify why Catholic Charities would ever have been involved in providing $250,000 per year to an adoption agency which contracted with the city “to increase the number of children adopted by lesbians, homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender persons.”

Such adoptions are an injustice to children and a violation of Catholic moral teaching.

The archdiocese’s relationship with Family Builders by Adoption was a compromise agreement with the city of San Francisco after Cardinal William Levada, then the Vatican’s newly appointed doctrinal chief and former archbishop of San Francisco, directed the archdiocese’s adoption program to stop placing children with homosexuals, as it had reportedly done in five cases since 2000

In response, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and city supervisors threatened to withdraw Catholic Charities funding and questioned its status as a non-profit. The board of supervisors unanimously passed a resolution accusing the Vatican of being a “meddling…foreign country”; said Archbishop George Niederauer and Catholic Charities should “defy” Cardinal Levada; and urged the cardinal “to withdraw his discriminatory and defamatory directive.”

The supervisor who introduced the resolution, a self-described gay Catholic, said the board would “take the necessary steps to defund Catholic Charities if this dispute cannot be resolved.” Two-thirds of Catholic Charities’ $30 million 2005-2006 operating budget was funded by government contracts.

To end the controversy, the archdiocese announced in mid-2006 it would shut down its 99-year-old adoption arm and instead provide Catholic Charities staff to Family Builders. Archbishop Niederauer said at the time the compromise would allow the archdiocese to continue to support adoption efforts while complying with the Vatican’s directive to halt homosexual adoptions.

osv.com/OSVNav/OSVNewsweeklyOctober122008/CatholicCharitiescutshomosexualadoptionties/tabid/6888/Default.aspx

That this compromise ultimately didn’t work isn’t surprising. But perhaps the compromise was simply intended to head off financial reprisals from the city and county government. Now, two years have gone by, the passions have cooled down, and Catholic Charities can trim its $250,000 contribution to Family Builders with minimal repercussions.

Neither Catholic Charities, nor the Archdiocese seems to be explaining why the money to Family Builders is being stopped. But since Catholic Charities ran a deficit of $1.2 million last year, perhaps it will be widely interpreted as financial cost-cutting.