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The first time Stephen and Paige Sanchez took their boys to Mass, the children had lots of questions. The boys were 2 and 4, and this was the first they had heard of Jesus. They saw a statue and asked who it was.
Mr. Sanchez told them it was St. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus. The boys looked at each other.
“Jesus was a foster kid?” the older boy said.
Mr. Sanchez said he was, kind of.
To himself, he thought, Man, the church loves us.
The two boys are now the adopted sons of Mr. Sanchez and his wife, but at the time they were his foster children, and everyone expected them to go back to their birth parents. The Sanchezes also have an older son, who was also adopted through foster care.
Stephen and Paige first began exploring adoption after five years of struggle with infertility. Then they discovered how many children in their area needed placement through foster care. They took a class, just to learn more.
“We started thinking God was asking us [to go down this path],” Mr. Sanchez said. So they kept going.
The day after they received their fostering license, they got a call asking them to take a child.
“We decided we’d say yes, just like if we were having our own children,” Mr. Sanchez said.
That child, who came to them deeply traumatized, stayed only a few days before moving to specialized therapeutic care. But the agency immediately asked about another child, a boy whose birth parents’ parental rights were going to be terminated. Would the Sanchez family accept him, and eventually adopt him?
They talked it over for 10 minutes and agreed. The boy joined them the next day.
Two weeks later, the agency called again. This time, it was two half brothers who needed a temporary home until they could be reunified with their parents.
That was the plan, as it usually is with foster care. The reunification goal got pushed back more than once. The birth parents, who struggled with addiction, were unable to get clean and create a safe environment for their boys. Finally, after two years of limbo, the court legally severed the birth parents’ rights, and Stephen and Paige adopted the boys.
The Sanchez boy who was 2 years old in the church that day is now 15, and since that day when they first met St. Joseph and “his foster kid,” the boys have learned volumes about their faith.
But one of their first lessons was that God had a son and sent him to live with another family because God loved his son and trusted the family. It became a way for the Sanchezes to talk about Catholicism, and about the relationship the two boys might have with their new parents and their birth parents.
“St. Joseph became a clear patron,” Mr. Sanchez said—for the boys, and also for him.
Sacrifice and Stability
The Sanchez family story seems to have as close to a fairy tale ending as possible. But the foster father analogy only goes so far. And the family’s story also demonstrates some of the things that make foster care so hard: the legal and psychological limbo.
In foster care, the goal is to reunite the child and their parents, but it is not always clear how long that might take. And that goal is ultimately met less than half the time. Sometimes the timeline is changed several times, and sometimes the parents’ rights are legally terminated without another family ready to step in and offer care. The future of a child frequently hinges on the sustained efforts of people who are already in crisis, in dire poverty, suffering domestic violence or in the grip of addiction.
The practice of foster care is also widely misunderstood, leaving foster families isolated even among communities that could be helping the most. But experienced foster parents often say two things: Foster care reveals things that are true of every parenting relationship. And fostering is intensely, inherently pro-life work that should be much more vigorously supported and promoted by the Catholic Church.
Foster parents will also speak of a profound joy and satisfaction that keeps them doing this work over and over again, as long as they can.
Approximately 400,000 children—enough to fill Yankee Stadium eight times over—spend time in foster care every year in the United States. Each year around 60,000 children see their birth parents’ parental rights terminated, and around 50,000 children are adopted from foster care each year. About 25,000 children every year age out of the system, and 20 percent of these become instantly homeless.
Despite the great need, foster care can be a hard sell, even to families with the resources for it. Many foster parents say friends tell them they would love to offer foster care, but they are afraid of getting too attached. They are afraid they will fall too deeply in love with their foster children, only to lose them.
“In [American] culture, parenting is a little bit possessive,” Mr. Sanchez said.
Catholic culture puts great emphasis on the sacred bond between parent and child; and Americans often cultivate and cherish their identity as parents, emphasizing self-sacrifice in the name of forming lifelong attachments with their children.
None of this meshes easily with the goal of foster care, which is to relinquish children back to their birth parents. If foster care works as it is designed to, that sacrifice will lead to goodbyes.
The tension can be brutal. It’s also profoundly Christlike.
Holly Taylor Coolman, assistant professor of theology at Providence College, the author of Parenting: The Complex and Beautiful Vocation of Raising Children and the adoptive mother of five, including one by way of foster care, said foster care is the best example of the kind of love Christians are called to.
“We’re called to love people and will the good of them, even when it requires self-sacrifice. Maybe even especially when it requires self-sacrifice,” she said. “It’s a kind of hospitality that may be very difficult for the host.”
The two youngest Sanchez boys call their adoptive mother “Mommy Paige” and their birth mother “Mommy H—,” and once poignantly suggested that their birth parents could live in the backyard, so they could visit back and forth.
Mr. Sanchez reminds his sons that it’s good to love your birth parents, and such affection doesn’t hurt him and his wife. What did hurt Mr. Sanchez is seeing times when his boys’ birth parents withdrew affection and didn’t seem to care. This is where the analogy of St. Joseph as a foster father falls short, Dr. Coolman said.
Mr. Sanchez said that when his boys are mad at him, they’ll pointedly ask how their biological parents are doing. He laughs, but also feels the sting. He knows it’s normal for the boys to have conflicted feelings. Dr. Coolman said that those feelings will likely continue throughout the children’s lifetime.
“Foster kids know better than anybody else that there really is an idea of being raised by your bio mother and father. They know it in their bones,” she said. They need to know that people who have not been raised in the so-called perfect family are also beloved and precious and are not fundamentally broken; that their biological family may not be whole, but each member can be a whole person.
“Brokenness is not the ultimate description of who they are,” she said. And yet it is essential for the new parents to affirm the children’s undeniable loss.
The Ties That Bind
The possessiveness of American parenting as described by Mr. Sanchez sometimes leads to stigmas against the foster children themselves. More than half of Americans, for instance, believe that kids are in foster care because they’re juvenile delinquents, not because they were previously in unsafe homes.
Mr. Sanchez said that some Catholics he has met have absorbed unwholesome cultural ideas about heredity or destiny, and they harbor an unspoken fear that when you foster, you’re inviting a problem into your house. “Like they come from bad stock,” Mr. Sanchez said with disgust.
But while people are not their genetics, our biological connections are important. “DNA matters, which means biological ties to parents matter,” said Dr. Coolman. “I think Catholic theology should be ready to stand up and say: These relationships with the person whose DNA you share, or the person in whose body you spend the first nine months of your existence, really matter.”
This reality is an underexplored facet of St. John Paul II’s theology of the body. “You don’t just remove a baby from the body in which [he] lived and act like you’re just taking a baby from a petri dish,” Dr. Coolman said. She added that it was, in fact, at the urging of a social worker at Catholic Charities that the country began to question its practice of closed adoption. Today, approximately 95 percent of adoptions are open adoptions, a practice that works to allow children to maintain a healthy connection to their biological family of origin.
When a child is removed from their home, the smells, the tastes and their whole physical reality changes, and it is a shock to their system. And as they grow, things like their physical appearance and their genetic predispositions will continue to assert themselves. You cannot simply sever the link, and acknowledging that this is so is profoundly Catholic.
But Catholics have a long way to go until foster care is perceived as a central dimension of pro-life activity. While it is true that Christians are twice as likely to foster or adopt as the general population, it ismore often Protestant churches that sponsor foster care ministries, not Catholic parishes.
The theology is lagging, and so are the logistical supports. Catholic foster parents will tell you that while individual clergy members, schools or parishioners may be supportive, it is rare for a Catholic parish to offer robust, organized support for foster families, or even to offer information about how to get involved.
There are some Catholic communities that get it right. In South Bend, Ind., where the Sanchez family now lives, foster care has been unusually integrated into parish life.
“It’s seen as how we participate in the culture of life: Not just by being politically active, but by taking care of each other,” Mr. Sanchez said.
He also said that the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd was a helpful resource. This Montessori-based faith formation program gave the boys a space to talk freely about God and family as they played, and it became a kind of religious play-based therapy.
At one parish the family attended, the congregation had been deliberately instructed on how to behave around foster families. They knew, for example, to give children autonomy by asking, “Who is this you have with you?” rather than asking, “Is this your mom and dad?”
But in other situations, people made clueless blunders, asking in front of the children if their birth parents were on drugs, which provoked long follow-up conversations between Mr. and Mrs. Sanchez and their children.
It Takes a Village
The Sanchez family’s faith was deepened immeasurably by their experience with foster care and adoption, and they constantly relied on their faith to sustain them through the difficult parts. They say their faith has strengthened tenfold since they took that leap.
Mindy Goorchenko’s story went the other way. The way the church treated her children helped fuel her eventual break-up with her Catholic faith.
Ms. Goorchenko, 45, is a forensic nurse practitioner who works for a child advocacy center in Chugiak, Alaska. She now has in her home six biological children aged 9 to 25, two adopted children who are siblings, and at times, a third sibling who has lived with them on and off for years and is close to adulthood.
Ms. Goorchenko also adopted two boys with life-limiting medical conditions, who have since died. She estimates she has fostered 15 to 20 other children over the years.
When Ms. Goorchenko first started working in Alaska, her sensibilities were shocked by the fluid sense of family among many of the Indigenous people she met. “A patient might say, ‘This is my third baby, but the first one I’m keeping.’ Babies are raised by other family members, and it’s a very open process,” she said. “There’s no stigma. Children will openly introduce an adult as ‘my aunt, but actually my mom.’”
The cliché that “it takes a village” is made real here.
But Ms. Goorchenko also saw how intergenerational trauma can haunt a historically oppressed people and felt a pull toward directly serving those invisible populations, including the inmates she served as a nurse at a correctional facility. She began working at Alaska Cares Child Abuse Response and Evaluation Services.
“I ended up never leaving. I fell in love deeply with the work,” she said.
She was also falling deeply in love with Jesus, and eventually with the Catholic Church. Her husband had his vasectomy reversed, and they were soon happily ensconced in a two-bedroom townhouse with five biological children.
“We were thrilled. We had the best experience, crammed in like pickled sardines. We had a beautiful life. We were crazy busy. We ended up being the safe place where a kid could come and play,” she said.
They also raised rabbits, birds and other pets. Ms. Goorchenko has a special weakness for disabled fowl, and two footless chickens still live in her house. She was eager to be “open to life” in all its forms.
“Having children come into our house was a blessing to us, and it was also our duty as humans, not just a personal decision,” she said.
But while they loved their new faith, they felt that they never fit into their parish. Big families were plentiful, but none looked like the Goorchenkos, with their diapers and wheelchairs, different ethnicities and fluctuating family status.
“We felt like weirdos. We adopted kids who came from pretty hard places. Those kids didn’t necessarily behave well. Two were severely disabled, with feeding tubes, and they were not able to be quieted,” she said.
The Goorchenkos weren’t ostracized, but they felt badly misunderstood. The goal for her foster kids was reunification with their parents, but fellow parishioners insisted on saying that they hoped she got to keep the kids. And they frequently told her she was a saint for doing what she did.
In her mind, she would respond, Dude, you have money, you have resources. Why don’t you do this, too?
Instead, other families put her on a pedestal and offered profoundly misguided platitudes.
“We had kids with severe disabilities who were going to die. It wasn’t if, it was when. But people would say, ‘I’m praying for their healing’ or ‘Their whole purpose is to love.’ No, his whole purpose was not to get viral meningitis and to be separated from his community in order to ‘be love’ for you all,” she said.
This uncomfortable history was not solely responsible for severing her relationship with the church and for making it feel like a place that could never be safe for her family. But it didn’t help.
Ms. Goorchenko was perpetually frustrated that pro-life Catholics weren’t doing more foster care. Every other homily seemed to be about culture wars, but the Goorchenkos felt alone in trying to deal with the day-to-day fallout of those battles. For instance, she said,L.B.G.T. kids really do get kicked out of their homes and end up in foster care.
“There are all these kids, who may have living parents, but they’re orphaned. They’ve been traumatized,” she said.
The fear of getting too attached is valid, she said, but she wishes adults would push themselves past it.
“It is good to get attached. That’s literally what the kids need, to have a safe attachment. It’s a huge blessing for their development, for their sense of self and safety,” she said.
Keeping an Open Heart
It’s hard to hear Ms. Goorchenko’s story and not feel overwhelmed by the sheer, undeniable difficulty of it. But Ms. Goorchenko mentioned “duty” exactly one time. The rest of the time, she spoke of joy. “Being able to see when a child goes from fear and trauma to a place of safety and normalcy is an extremely precious opportunity. I’ll never get tired of that,” she said.
As Ms. Goorchenko described watching a child relax and blossom in the shelter of her home, her vocabulary shifted from clinical to warm.
“Seeing a child make that transition is phenomenal. It’s such a privilege to see it. It’s a blessing. It’s really neat!” she said.
Her biological children were transformed, too. Her oldest kids were entirely on board with fostering and fell as deeply in love with the new kids as their parents did, and it mostly brought out the best in them. They suffered extreme grief when their adopted brothers died, but they never said they had regrets.
Ms. Goorchenko doesn’t sugarcoat the challenge. One foster teen had such destructive habits that the entire family felt traumatized after the older children joined that teen in dangerous and illegal behavior. But most of her foster teens had much simpler needs.
“We’ve had beautiful kids who just need to go to school and get their sh— done. Most of these kids just need a place to land and exist, without worrying about what’s going to happen to them,” she said. “They need people so badly.”
Foster parents don’t necessarily need to be overachievers. In fact, perfectionism would be an impediment. They should have a consistent and reliable schedule so they’ll be physically there for the kids. Corporal punishment is not allowed. Children need to be allowed to participate in their own faith practices, if any. Most of all, what’s needed is flexibility, and a willingness to roll with the punches.
Another perhaps unexpected saving grace that successful foster parents have: An open heart toward the birth parents.
Many foster parents will recall the horror of first learning how much abuse so many children endure; but they also refuse to speak disparagingly of the birth parents. They will insist it is vital to keep boundaries, but also to treat the birth parents with dignity.
Some Catholics take this approach even further, and make it a career.
Kimberly Bayer, a lawyer in Wisconsin, specializes in foster care cases. Ms. Bayer, who is Catholic and also an adoptive mother, frequently represents parents threatened with termination of parental rights.
“I like the underdog. It’s easy to dump on people whose kids have been removed. It’s harder to make sure their side of the story is being told,” she said. Ms. Bayer reiterated that the first choice of Child Protective Services generally is to find a familiar friend or relative who can assist with a temporary protective plan, to keep the child safe while interviews are conducted and the parents are investigated; and the agency also tries to avoid moving too quickly toward severing parental rights.
Ms. Bayer also noted that families with more financial resources often have “a very deep bench of very functional people who would step in” to take custody of children in a dangerous family situation, so many of the families who end up with children in foster care also face challenging financial and emotional situations.
When clients face the threat of removal or termination, Ms. Bayer advises them to cooperate with Child Protective Services, which may mean enrolling in therapy or parenting classes, or substance abuse treatment. She also advises them to know their legal rights.
She believes that the whole system functions better when all parents, even the most unsympathetic, are getting the solid and competent legal defense they’re entitled to. She’s seen what happens when those rights are ignored, including defending a father who did not speak English and who was assigned a Spanish translator—despite the fact that he didn’t speak Spanish either.
“There’s just something really unfair about jamming a guy through the system who doesn’t understand what’s going on,” Ms. Bayer said.
Ms. Bayer didn’t win that case. But she did change the tone of the struggle.
“The foster parents [of his child] hated my guts. They would come to court and see me making these arguments. I ended up reaching out to [the foster mother] and saying, ‘I’m not personally out to ruin your life. I understand you love this child. You’ve had her for a long time.” She told the foster mother that the birth father liked her, too.
That changed the tone and turned down the contentiousness, she said. When the birth father died, the foster mother went to his funeral.
Ms. Bayer wasn’t fighting for the child to be returned to an unsafe home, but to turn the termination case back into a child protection case, with the goal of doing whatever was possible to help the birth parents become safe caregivers for the child.
This, too, is in keeping with Catholic teaching.
“It’s a consistent principle. We say in the pro-life movement that what’s good for the mother is what’s good for the baby,” Ms. Bayer said. “It’s much better for the children if their parents’ good work is being recognized.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean reunification. But as an adoptive mother, Ms. Bayer said she adores her daughter’s birth mother.
“I want her to be a great person, because she is my daughter’s mother. I think my daughter is wonderful, and you just want the best for your kid,” she said.
Ms. Bayer has seen cases where the foster parents go above and beyond what’s legally required, to gain trust and to show they still respect the relationship between birth parent and child, even if the birth parents’ rights are eventually terminated.
As much as she relishes the challenge of her work, it can be wearying. “There’s just so many wounds. It’s hard to know where to start with some people,” she said.
Sometimes the whole C.P.S. system feels like a farce to her. Sometimes she wonders if the state should take the money it spends on foster care and just give it to struggling parents. Sometimes she is aghast to see that a parents’ rights have not been terminated.
But her job is simply to care about the client in front of her and let them see that one person is listening and will fight for them, even in difficult situations.
“When clients call me and say they got pregnant, they’re waiting for my reaction. I say, ‘Congratulations! It’s always a beautiful thing to be pregnant.’ That’s never really steered me wrong. You’re having a baby, we’re going to make a plan and try to protect you, get you in rehab. What’s good for the mother is good for the child,” she reiterated.
Foster care may not be the first thing a Catholic thinks of as pro-life work, but the Catholic foster parents who are living it now see clearly what the church wants every parent to know: that we have a serious obligation to help the vulnerable; that all parents ultimately come to a place where they are powerless; that children ultimately belong to God; and that our children may not always be with us.
Also: They are individual persons, separate from us. Successful adoptive and foster parents often avoid the parenting trap of seeing their kids primarily as an extension of themselves and their own successes or failures, Dr. Coolman said.
“They have an easier path to seeing their children precisely as a unique, unrepeatable person who may be very different from them. This is also true for bio parents; they just don’t always know it.”
As Mr. Sanchez put it: “You’re not the maker of your kids. It’s something every parent should learn, but it’s very stark in a foster kid, and that’s hard.”
It is hard. He also says it is worth it.
“It’s worth it not only for [the boys], but also for me and my wife,” Mr. Sanchez said. “We talk about this all the time: How much we have grown, changed, become more dependent on God. Having kids has been the greatest gift we’ve experienced. There are a million moments that are full of pain, sorrow, sadness, regret, you name it. None of that overwhelms the gratitude of what Christ is doing in our lives.”
