What does the Church teach re. homosexuals adopting children?

[per4mer530]

Is it true that the Catholic Church does not condone gay people adopting children and raising them together? If this is so, does the church not condone this because it is a sin or because it is merely viewed as inappropriate? Furthermore, is the practice of surrogate motherhood considered a sin? Being a homosexual man who is also active in the Catholic Church, I struggle with questions like these. I really feel the desire to have children someday, but if the Catholic Church teaches it is a sin, I guess I can’t. What would you suggest for a person in my situation who wants to have kids? Or is miraculously turning straight the only option?

 

[Fr.Vincent_Serpa]

Dear friend,

Just recently I answered a man whose non-Catholic wife assists him in his parish’s youth ministry. I didn’t encourage her assistance because children are so highly susceptible to the behavior modeled before them by those they look up to. We believe that the gift of our Catholic faith is the greatest gift we have been given. Being a Catholic truly matters and is not a minor thing to us; so with sexual modeling. The ideal is that a husband and wife adopt. While all adults do not have a right to have children, all children have a right to a mother and a father. That is the ideal. When adoption by a married couple is not possible, the Church is open to a single practicing Catholic adopting. It is not open to a couple of the same sex adopting for reasons of modeling as mentioned above. Certainly, the modeling of any lifestyle to innocent children that the Church teaches is sinful would be sinful as well.

Thank you for writing. It is so seldom that we hear from people like you who bear the cross of same-sex attraction and yet put the Lord’s teachings on sexuality, as expressed through His Church, above the counter voices of our secular culture.

Fr. Vincent Serpa, O.P.