Vatican II and same-sex adoptions

Vatican II's Declaration on Christian Education (Gravissimum Educationis) teaches us that: "Since parents have given children their life, they are bound by the most serious obligation to educate their offspring and therefore must be recognized as the primary and principal educators. This role in education is so important that only with difficulty can it be supplied where it is lacking. Parents are the ones who must create a family atmosphere animated by love and respect for God and man, in which the well-rounded personal and social education of children is fostered. Hence the family is the first school of the social virtues that every society needs. It is particularly in the Christian family, enriched by the grace and office of the sacrament of matrimony, that children should be taught from their early years to have a knowledge of God according to the faith received in Baptism, to worship Him, and to love their neighbor. Here, too, they find their first experience of a wholesome human society and of the Church. Finally, it is through the family that they are gradually led to a companionship with their fellowmen and with the people of God. Let parents, then, recognize the inestimable importance a truly Christian family has for the life and progress of God's own people." (No. 3).

There is an old proverb which says, "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." And there is much truth to that axiom. This is precisely why adoptions by same-sex "couples" are so alarming. If the hand that rocks the cradle belongs to an individual with a warped personality whose sexual orientation is "intrinsically disordered" (CCC, 2357), then, as Fr. Vincent P. Miceli has noted, "the world will not be ruled but ruined."

Do we really believe what Vatican II teaches? Do we really believe that "the family is the first school of the social virtues that every society needs"? Or are we willing to abandon innocent children to the corrosive atmosphere and negative influence of a psychopathology? Do we really believe that, as Vatican II teaches, it is "particularly in the Christian family, enriched by the grace and office of the sacrament of matrimony, that children should be taught from their early years to have a knowledge of God according to the faith received in Baptism, to worship Him, and to love their neighbor"? Are we prepared to deny innocent children their fundamental right to experience both a "wholesome human society" as well as the domestic church within a normal family with a mother and a father? Or will we sacrifice these innocent children to the perverse influence of crippled personalities who lack the grace which comes from the sacrament of marriage and which enables parents to fulfill their very great responsibility?

Only time will tell.

Paul Anthony Melanson