Instead, it said, its adoption-related efforts and resources will shift to education, outreach, information-sharing and linking prospective adoptive parents to county and private adoption agencies.
The shift allows the agency to continue promoting adoption without entering areas of conflict between the church's teaching against adoption by same-sex couples and civil laws requiring adoption agencies not to discriminate against such couples when placing adoptive children.
San Francisco Archbishop George H. Niederauer, chairman of Catholic Charities and the Catholic Youth Organization -- the full name of the archdiocesan agency -- said in media interviews that he told board members in March that the agency could not be involved in direct adoptions, but he wished to find ways to serve the adoption community that were compatible with both Catholic moral teaching and the requirements of civil law.
At his request, a working group of moral theologians and Catholic Charities staff and board members studied ways to continue supporting and facilitating adoption without violating church teaching or coming into conflict with the law.
In the face of a similar conflict in Massachusetts, Catholic Charities of the Boston Archdiocese announced in March that it would terminate its adoption services because it could not comply with a state law banning discrimination against gay or lesbian couples in the placement of adoptive children.
The Boston and San Francisco agencies had both placed a small number of children with same-sex couples before the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared in 2003 that it is "gravely immoral" to let same-sex couples adopt children. Doing so means "doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full development," the congregation said.
In an Aug. 2 letter to pastors, Archbishop Niederauer said he believes the proposals he approved avoid the church-state conflict and do so "in a manner that promises to provide substantially greater breadth, reach and numbers than we have been able to accomplish in the past."
He outlined two initiatives -- one to bolster an existing nonprofit Internet program that facilitates adoptions in California and one to promote adoption through parishes of the archdiocese.
"The first initiative is our involvement with the California Kids Connection, a collaborative effort in conjunction with Family Builders By Adoption, a nonprofit based in Oakland, and the State Department of Social Services, to develop and use Internet technologies to stimulate interest in adoption throughout the state," he said.
He said three Catholic Charities employees will be added to the current outreach efforts of California Kids Connection, significantly expanding the program, which offers online photos and profiles of thousands of adoptive children through a Web site, www.cakidsconnection.com.
According to authorities, most children in out-of-home care eventually return to their families, but each year about 6,000 California children are adopted. On any day, about 3,000 children in the state's foster care system await an adoptive home.
Archbishop Niederauer described the second initiative as a program to make parishes ongoing centers of information and formation about adoption needs and opportunities. A pilot program to develop that initiative is to be started next year.
He said Catholic Charities will work with the pastors and parish staffs to increase parishioners' awareness of adoptive needs, encourage families to consider adopting a child and offer information and guidance to those who are interested.
He said parishes are "a greatly underutilized resource to reach out with the call of Christ to find caring families for these most vulnerable children in our midst."
"There is no shortage of adoption agencies," Archbishop Niederauer said. "But there is a great need for qualified families."
When Catholic Charities began reviewing its adoption program last March, executive director Brian F. Cahill said adoption services accounted for about $450,000 of the agency's $37 million annual budget.
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