Archdiocesan agency helps homosexuals adopt children

The Boston Globe is reporting...

BOSTON --The social services agency of the Archdiocese of Boston has allowed 13 foster children to be adopted by same-sex couples in the past two decades, despite Vatican teachings against homosexuality.

Leaders of Catholic Charities of Boston said state regulations prohibit the agency from discriminating based on sexual orientation.

"If we could design the system ourselves, we would not participate in adoptions to gay couples, but we can't," the Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, the agency's president, told The Boston Globe in Saturday's editions. "We have to balance various goods."

The 13 adoptions -- a small fraction of the 720 placed by Catholic Charities in that period -- took place as part of a contract with the state Department of Social Services. The children placed with gay couples are among the most difficult to place, either because they are older or have physical or emotional problems.

Hehir said if they excluded gay couples, they wouldn't be able to help the hundreds of foster children that went to heterosexual couples.

Why would a Catholic agency participate in something that is clearly in conflict with Church teaching?

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church...

2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity [1], tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered [2].” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstance can they be approved.