Church's rift with Beacon Hill grows

The decision yesterday by the state's largest religious denomination to end its century-old adoption program illustrates a dramatic and intensifying clash between church and state, as Beacon Hill and the Vatican move in opposite directions on a wide variety of social policies, including not only homosexuality, but also abortion, bioethics, and emergency contraception.

The collision between the state's nondiscrimination policies and the church's opposition to adoption by same-sex couples is likely to have implications in the American political arena, where the rights of gays and lesbians have emerged as a major wedge issue, and in the Catholic Church, where dissatisfaction with church teachings has caused a major rift between laypeople and bishops.

And the inability of the state and the church to find a way out is the latest, but likely not the last, example of the complex challenges posed by the increasing reliance of state and federal governments on faith-based institutions to deliver social services.

''This is the tip of the iceberg," said Ram A. Cnaan, director of the program for religion and social policy research at the University of Pennsylvania, who said many faith-based organizations are questioning how their religious values are reflected in their charitable work. ''It's not business as usual anymore, even in large denominations. There are many quiet discussions of the same thing."

The Catholic Church of Boston has been finding homes for orphaned and needy children almost since its beginning, according to Thomas H. O'Connor, university historian at Boston College.

In the early 19th century, Bishop Benedict J. Fenwick asked a group of nuns to move to Boston from Maryland to take care of ''poor Catholic children," and over the next several decades priests and nuns began running homes and then orphanages.

In the early 20th century, Archbishop John J. Williams established and Cardinal William H. O'Connell strengthened Catholic Charities, an archdiocesan social services organization. The agency's earliest work was adoptions; part of the motivation was to make sure that orphaned Catholic youngsters were not placed by the state in Protestant homes.

And in recent decades, broadening its application of Catholic social teaching, Catholic Charities took on the heartbreaking and challenging work of finding homes for children in state custody, those whose age, behavior or health made them undesirable to many families seeking to adopt.

But a conflict between the Catholic bishops of Massachusetts and Beacon Hill has been evolving for several decades, as state policy makers have adopted an increasingly expansive view of gay rights, starting with a nondiscrimination measure in 1989 and culminating in 2004, when Massachusetts became the only state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage.

At the same time, the Vatican, often guided by the theologian who is now Pope Benedict XVI, became increasingly alarmed at the growing tolerance of homosexuality in the West, and in 2003 Benedict issued a doctrinal statement opposing same-sex unions and declaring that ''allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean 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 human development."

Many American Catholic lay people do not appear to agree with the church's conclusion. The lay board of Catholic Charities voted unanimously to continue placing children in gay households, and Catholic policy makers on Beacon Hill have provided the votes for many social policies opposed by the bishops.

But for the bishops the choice was difficult but clear.

''Sadly, we have come to a moment when Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Boston must withdraw from the work of adoptions, in order to exercise the religious freedom that was the prompting for having begun adoptions many years ago," Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley of Boston said yesterday.

Other religious denominations in Massachusetts have resolved such potential conflicts by essentially severing their social service organizations from their religious hierarchies.

The adoption program at Jewish Children and Family Services of Greater Boston calls itself ''a nonsectarian agency" and places children with gay individuals and couples, despite controversy over homosexuality within some Jewish denominations, according to adoption resources director Betsy Hochberg.

At Lutheran Social Services of New England, spokeswoman Martha Lindberg Mann said, ''We're a social service agency, not a church body. We know our parent bodies have firm positions not to ordain practicing gay persons, but on this issue, that's got nothing to do with the welfare of children."

But the Catholic Church maintains institutional and religious ties between church authorities and church-related organizations and asserts greater control over hospitals, schools, and charities. Catholic Relief Services, which receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government for overseas work on AIDS treatment, abstinence education, and child care, does not bid on contracts that involve condom distribution; Catholic hospitals do not provide a variety of services that conflict with church teachings.

''This is likely to become a major issue, at least in any state where same-sex unions are recognized for purposes of adoption," said Robert J. Wuthnow, director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. ''Catholic charities are a huge organization, and they do a major amount of social service work in the US, so this is not going to be an easy issue to resolve."

Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com.