Last week, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed a complaint in a Pennsylvania district court on behalf of foster parents working with Catholic Social Services at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Despite issuing a recent plea for more people to step up as candidates for foster parents, the city of Philadelphia is ending a contract at the end of June with Catholic Social Services in the archdiocese and have stopped referring children and families to them because of Catholic teaching on marriage and family.
This kind of clash is not new, but it is one that begs for a societal examination of conscience: In controversies where tolerance is invoked, the religion of secularism seems not to have a tolerance for traditional church teaching, values that even Democratic presidential candidates in quite recent history espoused. As cities face escalating crises in foster care owing to opioid addiction, we ought not tolerate children being sacrificed to ideological fights between adults. The adult thing to do may be to take a few steps back and consider not just the religious-freedom issues at stake but how children — most of them suffering all kinds of trauma that being without a permanent home only adds to — can best be helped to have a chance in life.
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