A federal appeals court granted a Catholic advocacy group's request Thursday for a new hearing on whether San Francisco expressed official hostility to religion in 2006 when the Board of Supervisors denounced a Vatican order to Catholic Charities not to place children with same-sex couples for adoption.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in June that the supervisors had not violated the constitutional requirement of government neutrality toward religion. The court said the city had acted for a legal, secular purpose - to protect gay and lesbian couples from discrimination.

On Thursday, the full court said a majority of its judges had voted to set the ruling aside and refer the case to an 11-judge panel for rehearing.

Robert Muise, lawyer for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which requested the rehearing, said he would argue that the city was "intervening in church affairs."

The supervisors' resolution "called on local Catholics to literally defy church teaching, to defy Catholic leaders," said Muise, an attorney with the Thomas More Law Center.

Deputy City Attorney Vince Chhabria said the Catholic organization was asking the court to rule that a church "should be immune from (government) criticism."

The board passed the nonbinding resolution, sponsored by then-Supervisor Tom Ammiano, in March 2006 after the Vatican declared that church-affiliated agencies such as Catholic Charities should not place children for adoption in gay or lesbian households.

Allowing children to be adopted by same-sex couples "would actually mean doing violence to these children," said the pronouncement by carinal William Levada, the former Catholic archbishop in San Francisco who heads the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Ammiano's resolution called the decree "an insult to San Francisco" and urged Catholic Charities and local Catholic officials to disregard it. In response, Catholic Charities of San Francisco stopped placing any children for adoption.

In the June 3 ruling, the court panel said the supervisors had been focusing on same-sex couples, not Catholics. Promoting equal treatment for those couples in adoptions isn't anti-religious, "regardless of whether the Catholic Church may be opposed to it as a religious tenet," Judge Richard Paez said in the 3-0 decision.

Shortly afterward, Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, issued a statement comparing the San Francisco board's actions to a Nazi policy in the 1930s of vilifying Jews, "laying the groundwork for more repressive policies, including the final solution of extermination."