From the editor’s desk

When tone matters

Serious issues are raised by the Government's proposals to forbid discrimination on the grounds of homosexuality, particularly as they are likely to impact on the work of church welfare agencies. The Catholic Church is not alone in finding a key requirement - that voluntary adoption agencies treat homosexual couples on the same basis as married heterosexuals - an uncomfortable challenge to its moral convictions.

Whether it can negotiate a workable compromise or whether this must inevitably be a fight to the last ditch is a moot point. The latter seems to be the view taken by the Archbishop of Birmingham, Mgr Vincent Nichols, who said in a sermon last week: "Those who are elected to fashion our laws are not elected to be our moral tutors. They have no mandate or competence to be so." Cooperation with Government across a whole range of welfare and educational activities, he said, was in jeopardy.

Not long afterwards, the Catholic bishops of Northern Ireland responded to a government consultation there about similar issues, but in a tone that invited dialogue and compromise. Maybe they expect religious bodies in the Province to be given exemptions from anti-discrimination requirements that the British Government is not proposing to allow on the British mainland, where the gay rights lobby is opposed to any such compromise with religious bodies and replies simply "then so be it" to the Catholic Church's threat to withdraw from handling adoption and fostering placements altogether - depriving some 200 children a year of their expert services.

There is a possible variation on this drastic course of action, which may not be practical but which would theoretically make sense - that Catholic agencies should revert to their original purpose of placing Catholic children with Catholic families, and cease to offer their expertise to the wider public. Obviously they could then apply stricter faith criteria to those they selected.

But this raises further questions about the role a Catholic agency fulfils in relation to the wider world and its mores. The fact that such agencies currently do not rule out couples where one or other partner has remarried after divorce, for instance, has not so far been regarded as a threat to the integrity of Catholic teaching. Already Catholic agencies differ in their response to couples seeking to adopt or foster who are not themselves married but are in stable partnerships. It is not so easy to justify accepting heterosexual couples who depart in these respects from Catholic norms while rejecting homosexual ones. It seems to say that homosexuality is particularly wrong. There are those who believe precisely that, but that view does not seem to be universal, even among Catholic bishops.

Discussions with - and inside - the Government are still ongoing. The tone with which the Catholic Church approaches these issues is as important as the content of what it says. That tone needs constantly to emphasise that the Catholic community itself contains homosexuals, including devoted couples; that Catholics are, like the rest of society, becoming more open-minded on these matters; and that, as the Northern Ireland bishops eloquently put it, discrimination against homosexuals, except where strictly unavoidable, is itself an evil. What the Church should definitely not do is to give the impression that it is in a war to the death, either with the Government or with the gay community.