They cared for the children

When abortion was legalized in 1973, Catholic Charities of Boston saw the number of babies put up for adoption plummet, and its caseload fell from about 500 to 50 children a year. The agency changed its focus to finding homes for older foster children.

In the following decade, when society grew more accepting of single parenthood, Catholic Charities became more tolerant as well and placed some needy children in families headed by one parent.

For more than 100 years, the sprawling social service agency adapted to many social shifts, determined to maintain its adoption program at the core of its spiritual mission. Since its founding in 1903, it has placed tens of thousands of children in homes, more than any other agency in the state.

But on Friday, the adoption agency will shut down, for the first time encountering a painful conflict between cultural change and Catholic doctrine that it could not resolve. Caught between the church's opposition to gays adopting children and state law that gives gays the legal right to become parents, the agency could not navigate a way forward.

``The overwhelming majority of the time we reconciled the differences between our roots in the Catholic Church and our mission to serve the larger society," said the Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, president of Catholic Charities of Boston. ``But this time, it was irreconcilable."

Despite its many decades serving a diverse population, including people of varying faiths, the adoption agency's ending reflects its beginnings, highlighting its role as a staunch defender of Catholicism.

Catholic Charities was formed with the purpose of ``safeguarding the faith" of Catholic orphans. At the turn of the 20th century, Catholic leaders sent an impassioned message to Protestant officials that Catholic babies must be raised Catholic. Priests complained about efforts to mislabel the children as Protestants, and give them Protestant upbringings.

The Archdiocese of Boston formed the Catholic Charities Bureau, and its workers scoured state records to uncover evidence of miscategorized Catholic children and place them in Catholic homes.

``Charles Dolan, born Dec. 26, 1897, in Salem; mother dead; was placed in Children's Home, Carpenter Street, Salem . . . and recorded a Protestant," said the agency's 1904 annual report. ``The Bureau discovered the Baptism record of the child, and had the child recorded as Catholic and transferred to a Catholic family in West Newton."

As Catholics grew in number and prominence in the state, the fears of church leaders that religious rights of Catholic babies would be overlooked subsided. In 1951, the state's highest court sided with Catholic Charities in a nationally publicized custody battle involving Hildy McCoy, a baby born to nursing student Marjorie McCoy. McCoy gave up her baby for adoption to a Brookline couple, but then she sought to renege, saying she did not realize the couple was Jewish. The court ordered her baby to be placed with Catholic Charities, though years later, after the Jewish couple fled to Florida, a court in that state finalized the girl's adoption to them.

By the middle of the 20th century, Catholic Charities' adoption service was thriving, handling on average more than one adoption a day.

But then the legalization of abortion in 1973 dramatically altered the future of the agency. No longer was there a steady stream of newborns from desperate mothers, mostly of Irish or Italian descent. By the early 1980s, Catholic Charities handled on average about 50 adoptions a year, its numbers greatly reduced largely because of Roe v. Wade.

``That turned the whole thing around," said Bishop Francis X. Irwin, who joined Catholic Charities in 1968 and became its director in the mid-1980s.

Irwin said other social trends contributed to the drastic reduction of adoptions , including the greater availability of birth control and the women's movement, which led to women bearing fewer children.

A pregnant woman also had new options, he said. ``If they were going to have a child, they'd keep the child. It became more accepted," he said.

In 1977, the agency began focusing more on government contracts involving troubled foster children, signing its first agreement with the Department of Social Services to handle ``special needs" cases: babies born with drug addictions and physical disabilities, as well as teenage foster children.

The agency soon became the top private provider of adoptive homes for hard-to-place foster children. Hehir said Catholic Charities had tried to stay in the adoption business as long as it could, largely to provide an alternative to abortion. He said adoption was long considered ``a central work of the church."

In some ways, it was Catholic Charities' ability to adapt to social change that set in motion its ultimate collision with Vatican doctrine. In 1989, the Massachusetts Legislature expanded the state's antidiscrimination statute to include gays and lesbians, and then four years later, the Supreme Judicial Court issued a landmark decision that allowed a same-sex couple to jointly adopt a child.

In 1997, Catholic Charities quietly finalized its first adoption to a same-sex couple. It continued along that path for the next eight years, placing 13 foster children with gay parents who, from agency accounts, proved to be dedicated caretakers.

But an even greater social transformation was on its way, as gays began pushing for what no state had given them: the right to marry.

The Vatican had never issued a public statement on gay adoption until 2003, when the topic was included in a seven-page document, ``Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons," canon scholars said.

The document, which came as part of the Vatican's response to gay marriage controversies in North America and Europe, said that children were best raised by a mother and father united in marriage. It also called gay adoptions ``gravely immoral."

When Hehir took over as the head of Catholic Charities in January 2004, he said he sensed that a clash between the Vatican's document and the agency's adoption service was inevitable.

Last fall, after the Globe reported that Catholic Charities was facilitating gay adoptions, despite Vatican teachings, controversy erupted.

Under pressure to act, the state's four Catholic bishops said that they would study the issue . In February, the bishops concluded they could not continue the practice and sought an exemption from the state. Within days, eight lay board members of Catholic Charities of Boston resigned in protest.

The bishops' request found little support on Beacon Hill, where despite the Catholic dominance of the Legislature, support for gay rights was firmly established.

By early March, Catholic Charities officials had concluded there was no room left in which to maneuver. Continuing gay adoptions, in the eyes of the Vatican, would constitute an implicit endorsement of gay marriage, church leaders here believed.

``In a sense, this [gay adoption issue] is a subordinate question within the larger question," Hehir said. ``The larger question is the teaching on marriage."

Church Charities announced it would shut down its adoption operation June 30. Around the city, the news set off anguish and sadness, as people struggled with a question not just about gay rights, but the fate of vulnerable foster children.

Hehir called the decision heartbreaking and stressed that the agency would continue its other services such as homeless shelters and immigration services. He said its legacy of adoption service should not be lost, despite its divisive end.

``They cared for the children and put them first from beginning to end," he said. ``And care meant a combination of moral commitment, quality of professional care, and unremitting devotion to the welfare of the children."

Wen focuses on enterprise feature stories in the metro section, writing mostly about children, family and medical issues. A staff writer since 1986, she has covered several beats, including the Boston public schools, consumer news and human behavior. She also served for several years on the Globe's Spotlight Team, an investigative reporting team. In 2004, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.