Boston Redux
I agree with Robert Imbelli that the Boston Globe editorial board as magisterium is an unalluring prospect. Granted, it might improve the Osservatore Romano sports page.
Still. Does no one share a more basic disappointment? If I have it right, Catholic Charities in Boston and San Francisco very occasionally placed hard-to-place children with gay/lesbian couples as part of their adoption programs. Case by case this was deemed best for the children. And despite much blustering to the contrary little empirical evidence suggest that gay/lesbian families “damage” adopted children while much empirical evidence demonstrates that unstable living situations do. Then a Vatican convinced that Catholic Charities could not countenance this practice intervened, with Archbishop Levada now emailing his old archdiocese, where the practice had apparently not seemed troubling to him at the time, ordering his one-time colleagues to cease and desist.
The ethicists among us can parse the fine points of “material cooperation.” And I won’t touch upon the political uproar in Massachusetts. But isn’t this an example of a reasonable Catholic casuistry being replaced by an unattractive, even sectarian, purity?
I have degrees in social work, human services and counseling as well as theology, and so I find myself having to wrestle with varying competing impulses within myself when questions like this arise.
Even the best orphanages are terrible places for children, and foster care is no replacement for a stable home. Every child has a right to be loved and to have a home, and considering the alternative, there is a strong temptation to seek out any home that will accept the child.
On the other hand, in Deus Caritas Est, Benedict highlights something that I have long asserted. There is a difference between social work and social justice. Mother Teresa observed this when she argued that her MC’s “weren’t social workers” which seems a shocking statement considering the nature of their charism and ministry. The difference is this. Social work is about meeting the need. Period. But social justice has to be about meeting the need in a way that highlights the godly dignity of both the person being served and the person doing the serving. Even if you aren’t particular about how your need is met, I am not respecting the dignity of my personhood if I serve you in a way that places you in a situation I believe to be immoral and contrary to God’s purpose for the human person.
The bottom line is that, for the Christian, there are bigger things at stake than food, shelter, and clothing. We cannot be most concerned with building a just society, we must be primarily concerned with building the Kingdom that points primarily toward eternal realities.
And so, while it is tempting to ask “what would it hurt” to let a well-meaning homosexual couple take in a child, the reality is that this is the wrong question. The real question is, “How can the Church serve at all if the Church is compelled by the state to serve in a manner that detracts from its primary mission; to point to eternal truths, to be a means of sanctification, and to stand as a witness to the Christian anthropological foundations of the human person.
If the state will not allow the Church to be Church, then whatever else it does, the Church cannot allow itself to become a social service agency that stinks of incense and good intentions.
Some time ago, writing in The Tablet (UK) Timothy Radcliff, wrote that the most important thing missing from Vatican documents on homosexuality is any sense of “love”.
In all statements about same sex marriage and heterosexual marriage as un-natural and natural there has been little or no mention of love. One would think from our bishops the only think that matters is, in their terms, “erotic love”. You know what we mere morals call having sex!
As the Church teachers, and Pope Benedict has reinforced is that we as couples are to strive for a spiritual love beyond the sexual which theologians express as “agape”. Now somewhere within that journey we have developed the concept of family. Somewhere within agape is the joining of children to adults in a relationship which goes beyond mere sexual gratification. And somewhere within that sense of family we go beyond just mother and father but extend the concept to others.
In claiming that homosexuals are not capable of raising a child with love, our Church is claiming that a person with a homosexual orientation is incapable of achieving “agape” either with another adult of the same sex or of a child even one they may have created from their own womb or seed.
This of course is a preposterous proposition. Thus the first question remains as John McGreevy claims, the welfare, both spiritual and physical, of the child.
On a personal note I know better than most on what I speak regarding adoption. I, my brother and two sisters were all “graduates” of The Catholic Children’s Aid Society in Toronto. Yes we were raised by both a mother and a father. They would have been considered “old” when they were wed, even by today’s standard. In my memory of them their sure wasn’t much that was “erotic” in their relationship but somewhere buried beneath their “unattractive sectarian purity” there must have existed of agape which extended to us as children.
I also want to admit, as both a Catholic and an adoptee, I fought the very idea of homosexuals, especially men, adopting a child, but one day a sort of light just went on because first and foremost I got past the barrier of sex to what I think is a must deeper sense of love, the kind of love that a parent or grandparent, or uncle/aunt or just a neighbour has for a child. It is a love that does not just objectify the child, (which is what I am afraid our Church and its bishops are doing) but it a love for all children which goes much deeper and burrows right into our soul. Now that is a “natural law.”
The qusetion is indeed a vexing one that requires serious and nuanced reflection. It does not help to sidetrack the issue by creating a false dichotomy between a just society and the Kingdom of God. First, it is against the Gospel to think that we are called to build the Kingdom of God. It is ever clear in the New Testament that the Kingdom comes on its own terms and in its own time. Christians do not bulid it or hasten its coming. This kind of thinking smacks of Pelagianism. Rather, Christians are to prepare to receive the Kingdom. One apt way to do that is to create a just scoiety on earth. One marked by love as much by justice. How to do that is where the discussion should be directed.
Good thing Bernard Law is in Rome. We don’t have to consider him as a possible person who would adopt. And he once supervised those who supervised adoptions. Yet it took the magisterium of the Boston Globe to get Law and his colleagues to stop placing children at the mercy of known perverts. I guess case by case means that a lot of vigilance and thought is going into adoptiong by homosexual partners. Justice? Were the Samaritans as hated?
Does it matter, intrinsic or extrinsic we all have some “disorder”. To best of our ability nurture and love God’s little ones-that’s the ticket
As someone who is adopting themselves…I know first hand what a lousy place an orphanage is for a child. I also know that the most important thing the child needs is love–it is what these children have been most deprived of.
That being said…all the studies that are out there show that a child does best with a mother and a father. Unfortunately, there are no studies on adoptees of gay parents that I know of. My sense is that the studies aren’t allowed because it’s a huge political football. And thus the welfare of the children in these families are not examined, possibly to the detriment of homosexual couples who’d like to adopt.
Regardless, my sense is that the children who get adopted by gay couples do well. Whether this is an overt acceptance of homosexuality is debatable, and we would need to examine how church can appropriately respond to this. I wonder if a more conservative response in which these couples would be denied because of their gayness would have a similar reaction in a collective group of Catholics applied to care for a child (can people even do that?)?
My overwhelming thought on the matter is that there are a lot of really lousy parents who could learn a thing or two from those who show much love to their child–gay or not. Perhaps all parents should need to go through such a litmus test?
The hierarchy loses a considerable amount of credibility on this issue by framing adoption in terms of the morality of the prospective parents rather than the morality of the millions of parentless children in the world. The CDF statement on gays being unfit as parents was not much more than a footnote in a document treating marriage and sexual morality.
The issue must be examined from the viewpoint of the child. Until then, as an adoptive parent, I consider Church teaching in this issue as woefully incomplete. Until conservatives want to initiate their home studies and start lining up for the 127,000 American children waiting (this moment!) for a family, I think they should hold their tongues. Unless they want to educate themselves on the real issues, of course.
If people who have children the old-fashioned way had to go through one tenth of the scrutiny that potential adopting parents or any sexual orientation do, there would probably be far fewer children up for adoption!
But, of course, we know that there is a 100%right to breed at will and hang the consequences.