Scottish Catholic Observer

When, last Friday, it was announced that Scotland’s last Catholic adoption agency had been saved, I had more reason than most to breathe a sigh of relief.

For 48 years ago, at this time, St Margaret’s Adoption Society (as St Margaret’s Children and Family Care Society was then) arranged my adoption. For me that event evokes three major sentiments of gratitude.

Firstly, gratitude to my birth mother who made the greatest sacrifice any mother could ever make in handing over her child to the agency, because she knew that she could not give me the kind of life she would have wanted for me. I never knew that heroic lady, but every day I am grateful to her for that act of supreme selflessness.

It also prompts my gratitude for my mum and dad (both now gone to their reward). I never use the term ‘adoptive parents.’ For me they were simply the best, most caring and loving parents anyone could ever have.

Finally, I am eternally grateful to St Margaret’s. It was through their patient work that I was given a chance of a new life.

And so it was with dismay that I watched, over the last year, as the Secular Society in Scotland complained to the Scottish charity regulator. Their wish was that St Margaret’s be stripped of its charitable status because it did not represent a public good; that the agency was anti-equality because (all other things being equal) it gives preference to couples who have been married for two years. The regulator agreed last year and St Margaret’s was given an ultimatum: Change or lose your charitable status.

Last week the Scottish Charity Appeal Panel ruled that the secularists and the regulators had got it wrong and that St Margaret’s could continue to do what it does best… make loving families.

In light of the decision I felt no urge to punch the air in triumph.  The word ‘victory’ did not appear in any press release or comment that I made. Rather the overwhelming emotion was one of relief: Relief that good people could get on with doing good work for children in great need—children like me all those years ago.

St Margaret’s was always an unlikely pawn in an ideological war. The agency is not about campaigning or politics. It’s about putting little children first, often sibling groups who are hard to place, and finding for them the very best home they can.

Is that ambition so terribly wrong? This week we got the answer. The right answer.

— Ronnie Convery is the communications director for Glasgow Archdiocese

—This story ran in full in the Feb 7 edition print of the SCO, available in parishes.