A Picture of God's Love for a Lost World

There was an interesting discussion in the combox at Adoptio about transracial adoptions the other day, which, like so many other posts, suffered in the Great Blogger Crash of May 2011 (the original post is back up now, but the original comments have been washed away).  In it, Mrs. C asks her readers for advice on how to address racial issues with her daughter, due in just a few weeks, who may be racially different from her husband and herself.

The first time she posted, several readers mentioned that the magazine Adoptive Families tends to have good information about these things, but that they had cancelled their subscriptions because of other subject matter in the magazine that was offensive to their faith as Catholics (these comments are now gone).  I have read several issues of Adoptive Families myself, and I agree that its editorial position in favor of gay adoption and surrogacy and egg donation (which, it seems to me, are hardly appropriate topics for inclusion in a magazine about adoption) is dismaying.

In order to verify what I recalled about the magazine, I went hunting around for an issue, the most recent of which I found lying face down in a pile of other neglected reading material on my desk.  I was surprised and impressed to find on the back cover a full-page ad for liberal whipping-boy Focus on the Family's adoption ministry, I Care About Orphans.

I poked around on the Focus on the Family adoption website, and found that the organization has spearheaded an initiative to encourage Christians to adopt -- especially to adopt waiting children out of U.S. foster care -- and to provide resources and support before, during, and after adoption.  One of Focus on the Family's spokeswomen, Kelly Rosati, speaks eloquently in a video about how her family's commitment to the sanctity of human life inspired her to adopt four children out of foster care, and notes:

Adoption is God's idea.  It comes straight out of the Scriptures.  We read that all of us who are believers in Christ have been adopted into God's family through faith in Christ . . . . Adoption is a picture of God's love for a lost world.

Rosati goes on to talk about how Focus on the Family partnered with the Department of Human Services in Colorado to encourage Christians to adopt out of foster care, and that, as a result, the number of children waiting for families was reduced by more than half.

This is wonderful.  I wonder why the Catholic Church is not involved in any sort of similar effort.