Mixed Morality in the Peoria Adoption Solution

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 07, 2011

Yesterday Catholic World News reported that the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois would let Catholic Charities there turn over its staff and adoption/foster care caseload to a new organization. The new group will comply with a State law requiring equal treatment for gay couples. There is good news and bad news here.

The good news is that Peoria Bishop Daniel Jenky is aware of his responsibility “to assure that Catholic Charities operates consistently with the teachings and values of the Church.” Thus Catholic Charities will divest itself of its State adoption/foster care contracts. Indeed, the Chicago Tribune reports that Catholic Charities will gradually give up all State contracts, which now total some $23 million, and will soon rely exclusively on private funding. That is a highly moral stance, and it also takes at least one diocesan Catholic Charities system in a direction from which it should never have deviated in the first place.

But the bad news is truly troubling. While Bishop Jenky recognizes his responsibility for the moral character of Catholic Charities, nothing has been reported to indicate that he is equally aware of his responsibility for the moral conduct of the persons who make up the staff of Catholic Charities.

The Church is not required to vacate her adoption and foster care role in Peoria because she has some peculiar disciplinary requirement concerning her formal institutional role. Rather, she is required to vacate this role because it is immoral for any person to place adoptive and foster care children with gay couples. Not only does it place such children at increased risk, but it directly participates in the mythology of gay marriage, which is based on a deep denial of reality with serious and inescapable moral consequences.

One wonders, then, how this deal was done. Could it be that all Catholic Charities staff members do not personally adhere to Catholic principles? According to the Tribune,  the new organization, Youth Service Bureau of Illinois Valley, will have no allegiance to the Church and will serve couples in civil unions. This assurance is attributed to Mike Drymiller, identified as a “Catholic financial advisor and one of the founding board members” of the new entity.

We may presume, I hope, that the word “allegiance” was ill-chosen, but it is not morally permissible for any Catholic to ignore the teachings of the Church in his or her “private capacity”. And it is not morally permissible for any adoption/foster care worker to place children with gay couples.

Contrary to what is apparently a widespread belief, moral behavior is not required of us only when we happen to work for official Catholic agencies which are actively seeking (as is not always the case) to maintain a specifically Catholic reputation. Moral behavior is required of all of us all of the time.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the discussions which led to this creative plan to keep adoption and foster care services going in the face of the State’s insistence that these services be provided in an immoral way (an insistence which is still being challenged in court by serveral other dioceses). But even if I was not there, God was. God knows who said what, and who approved what, to convince everyone that this strategy avoided an ugly moral dilemma. Our Lord took note of who assumed, and with what justification, that all staff would be morally stunted enough to agree. And if the entire staff does believe this solution ends a moral dilemma, God also knows how they came to be hired in the first place. I’m here to remind everyone involved in this sorry affair and others like it: God knows.

We should be happy, I suppose, that all of this is not being done “under the Catholic name”, as it has been in some other places, along with many other grave evils, such as those perpetrated in many officially Catholic hospitals, universities and colleges. Certainly I am very glad that this is not the case here. But make no mistake: We have a long, long way to go as Catholic people if we think that dropping the Catholic name makes black white, or evil good.