Purity in our Catholic Schools

Our guest blogger Josie is concerned about some of the teachings that have slipped into Catholic curriculum. She started a blog because she felt very passionate about helping to raise awareness about problems she has experienced and hopes to rally other parents to make changes.

Josie states:

"The Catholic schools in my Archdiocese are attempting a valiant effort to
strengthen their Catholic identity in order to avert a crisis. Unfortunately,
they seem to be ignoring the one glaring stick in their eye whose removal might
have the power to restore them to their original glory. This stick has two
branches, both with very misleading names: The first, “Safe Environment”, the
second, “Growing in Love” (insert here whatever your school is using Virtus,
Benziger Family Life, etc.).

The former entered as a seemingly well-intentioned, but truly toxic remedy to
the cancer of the sexual abuse scandals which surfaced a few years ago. It
attempts to place young children in the role of “self-protector” against
potential abusers, all the while harming them psychologically and spiritually.
This shock treatment seeks to inundate their innocent minds with detailed,
graphic and confusing information that promises to steal from them a latency
period that God has granted to all children to protect and defend their souls
from the enticements of a world they are not meant to enter until much later in
life, when they are emotionally and spiritually ready. These “safe environment
programs” also instill in the children, as they are subjected to the material
yearly starting at age five, a fear, mistrust and suspicion of caregivers,
family and other adults, which no child should have to carry around with them as
they attempt to make sense of life. There is a much more brilliant articulation
of all of this in a booklet written by the Catholic Medical Association
entitled, “To Protect and To Prevent, The Sexual Abuse of Children and Its
Prevention” which you can purchase from their website at www.cathmed.org. None
of this is intended to minimize the atrocity of child sexual abuse and the
victimization of innocent children, but rather to suggest that the current
“solution” to the problem needs to be seriously re-evaluated and corrected, as
it is in some effect a form of child abuse itself.

And the latter program (Growing in Love, et al), I believe, entered fashionably
late behind the sexual revolution, as one more arrow in the arsenal of those
powers that would like children to remain pure and chaste for as short a time as
possible. These programs serve to desensitize our children to sexual terms,
acts, lifestyles, etc., so that they might somehow be made “whole”-starting in
Kindergarten. It seems to be the hope of these programs that the children
embrace the secular “need” to invert the true and beautiful God given gift of
human sexuality, so that they might find freedom from the Dark Ages of sexual
repression. If there was a possible need to take another look at how we were
communicating this beautiful gift to our children in the past, it was NOT so
that we could better fit in with secular society and the culture of death. But
this seems to be what the writers intended.

Instead of inviting parents to study Holy Mother Church’s teaching on human
sexuality so that they themselves could impart the proper information at home,
in the right context, at the right time, each considering the individual
maturity level of the child, these programs acted to “replace” the parental
role, as they say “because most parents don’t want to do it anyway”. This became
the perfect opportunity for a false prophet to enter and impart his own set of
painful twisted “ethics” intermingled with some “catholic” words to make it look
good. And the schools seemed to open the doors wide to this unwanted visitor.

It is my humble hope to rally some parents to sling some pebbles at this
Goliath, marching under the flag of Truth, so that primarily our children will
be protected and in so doing, our Catholic schools may once again flourish.

Please feel free to visit my blog at "Keeping Catholic Education Pure."