Valerie Schmalz reports for Our Sunday Visitor:
SF Catholic Charities cuts ties to homosexual adoptions
Controversial arrangement ends amid budgetary pressures, protests
The Archdiocese of San Francisco's Catholic Charities plans to sever its two-year funding relationship with an adoption agency, Family Builders by Adoption, that focuses on placing children with homosexuals."The funding from Catholic Charities is ending this [budget] year," Jill Jacobs, executive director of Family Builders by Adoption, told Our Sunday Visitor Sept. 25. Catholic Charities CYO currently provides two staff members for the agency at a cost of about $250,000 annually.
It is not clear what motivated the decision, which means the archdiocese will no longer have any involvement with adoptions. A Catholic Charities spokeswoman declined to comment.
"The CCCYO relationship with California Kids Connection [Family Builders' adoption program] was not envisioned as being long term," archdiocesan spokesman, Maurice Healy, told OSV in a one-sentence e-mail statement. He did not explain why the archdiocese did not describe the arrangement as temporary when the partnership was announced two years ago.
"I'm very happy to hear that Catholic Charities is severing its relationship with Family Builders by Adoption. I think the archdiocese now understands that Family Builders is a totally unsuitable partner," said Gibbons Cooney, a Catholic activist who operates the website SanFrancisco-Catholic.com, devoted to documenting homosexual associations within the archdiocese.
Catholic Charities recently revealed it was undergoing budget difficulties. In an annual letter mailed to archdiocesan households in September, the archdiocesan agency reported a $1.2 million deficit in the $39.3 million 2007-2008 budget. Catholic Charities said the deficit would be corrected with operational changes in the current fiscal year ending June 30, 2009.
Read the entire story, which will appear in the October 12th edition of the OSV newsweekly.
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