Joliet, other dioceses right to end lawsuit

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Updated: December 26, 2011 8:52AM

We congratulate Catholic Charities of Illinois for sticking to its theological guns and ending a legal fight over it continuing to oversee foster care. We congratulate the state of Illinois for standing up for the rights of civil union couples to be foster or adoptive parents.

And we welcome common sense for triumphing, and all the parties for their ideological clarity. Sometimes oil and water can’t be made into a perfectly blended liquid.

But we’re not sure what to say about the Belleville Paradox. This week, the Belleville Diocese split with Catholic Charities so the charitable arm of the church can follow the recent civil union law and continue to license foster parents.

The new agency is Christian Social Services of Southern Illinois. In all visible aspects, it’s a Catholic Charities clone with a different name. Same staff; same mission. This one says it will follow state law.

The Belleville charity spends $13.1 million annually in licensing care but gets only a fraction of 1 percent from the diocese. About 85 percent comes from the state.

So now the Belleville diocese’s fellow litigants, the Joliet and Springfield dioceses, have a new model if they wish to stay in the foster care business. The foster children they administer for the state can be shipped to another agency. Or they can keep their $30 million in state contracts and, we presume, avoid discrimination against civil union couples.

Catholic Charities in each diocese could make its own decision, though it takes steely will to secede from a bishop’s authority. The battle now seems to have edged into pragmatic management.

But if a Catholic agency must bar gays from Catholic-supported foster care as a religious principle, how do you uphold values just by changing your name? We thought that value was the basic issue that caused the original legal fuss.

If Catholic Charities has the will, there now appears to be a way. At the least, children near Belleville will benefit, and that’s the point of quality foster care. If the Belleville Paradox works, who are we to complain?