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PDF versionVatican paper backs Dolan on sex ed
by John L Allen Jr on Aug. 30, 2011
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
The Vatican newspaper has backed Archbishop Timothy Dolan in a debate over over a new sex education curriculum in New York City, which is supported by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a means of combating early and unintended pregnancies, especially among Black and Latino youth.
The initiative has been criticized by Dolan for, among other things, potentially usurping the role of parents in shaping the moral values of their children.
“What message are we giving our kids when we say, ‘We know you're going to do this … we know you’re going to succumb to all the temptations around you, we know everybody’s doing it, we know you can’t be good, so be careful,’” Dolan asked in a recent interview with New York television.
“I don’t know if that's a wise message,” said Dolan, who also serves as president of the U.S. bishops’ conference.
In a front page essay in the August 31 edition of L’Osservatore Romano, Lucetta Scaraffia, the paper’s most prominent female columnist, applauds Dolan's stance.
Whenever a church official criticizes a sex education program, Scaraffia writes, a familiar pattern emerges: “[The church] earns an image in the media as an obscurantist force, cruel in its indifference to the consequences that its refusal can have among youth, meaning unwanted pregnancies and disease.”
“However, that’s not how things are,” she asserts.
Scaraffia says that Western public institutions seem to have a “magical trust” in the efficacy of sex ed programs, despite what she says is abundant evidence that years of such courses in countries such as the United Kingdom have not brought down rates of either teen pregnancy or abortion.
“By now, it’s clear that it is absolutely not enough to explain how to use contraceptives and where to find them easily in order to avoid these tragedies,” she writes. “The problem is more upstream, in education and therefore in the family.”
Scaraffia asserts that Italy, which does not have a mandatory sex ed curriculum in its public schools, has comparatively low rates of sexually transmitted disease among adolescents and low rates of teen pregnancy. She attributes that not only to the role of Italian families, but also the Catholic church.
The church, she writes, “continues to teach that sexual relations are much more than a pleasant pastime that one can engage in recklessly without running risks.”
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The church “teaches respect for one’s own body, which means attaching importance and weight to the acts one commits with it, and not considering those acts as nothing more than opportunities for entertainment or narcissistic satisfaction.”
That position, Scaraffia charges, “is precisely the opposite” of what the church’s critics generally claim.
“Catholics cannot accept that the sexual life can be considered an education topic like any other, presented in terms of risks that it would be better to avoid,” she writes.
The new curriculum in New York represents the first time sex education will be taught in the city’s public schools in two decades. According to media reports, it includes lessons on how to use a condom and the appropriate age for sexual activity.
Students will be required to take one semester of sex education in 6th or 7th grade, and again in 9th or 10th grade. Parents will be able to have their children opt out of the lessons on birth-control methods.
Reportedly, the curriculum will also discuss chastity in addition to contraception, partly in an attempt to reflect the concerns of religious groups.
Scaraffia, the author of the L'Osservatore essay defending Dolan, is a member of Italy’s National Commission on Bioethics and the author of a 2008 book on the church and sexuality. A prominent feminist activist during the 1970s, Scaraffia had a daughter out of wedlock in 1982. She returned to active practice of the Catholic faith after what she has described as a conversion experience in Rome’s Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere.
What a foolish article this
What a foolish article this is.
Shall we pick education or ignorance?
If sex is ever addressed in catholic school -- which I attended for sixteen years --,it is only to say don't do it until you are married. That is all well enough.
But sexuality effects us down to our cells.
Learning how to deal with sex is a problem for each one of us.
It is far better to learn about sex and sexuality in a classroom. Your friends are probably ignorant about it. Most parents are often unwilling to discuss it.
The church hasn't done a good job about it.
Do you really think that Dolan has any experience to offer about sex?
It is not the place of a
It is not the place of a school teacher to form the moral opinions of the children in his care. As the Church teaches, the parents are the primary educators of their children and, therefore, they have the final say on what, when, how, and why their children learn what they learn. This is very logical and simply undeniable. Parents send their children to school trusting that the teachers will give them a good education and REINFORCE what they learn at home in the moral spectrum. In other words, no matter what religion you are with respect to public schools, teachers reinforce what the children are taught at home with regards to common courtesy, being virtuous, and the like. At Catholic schools,from which I graduated from high school and now attend a Catholic college, it is the responsibility of the teachers to reinforce what the parents teach their children at home, in this case, namely chastity and abstinence. If a child doesn't know anything about sex, let that be up to his parents when he finds out. It is a complete invasion of the sanctum of the family for the state to force something with the gravity of sexual activity. In addition, the quality and direction of the sex ed is often questionable in morality at best. First of all, it is simply stupid to tell kids all these horrible things that can happen to you if you sleep around, but then tell them how to "protect" themselves and not have those consequences, which are not full proof by any means in themselves. Secondly, the teachers that do mention chastity and abstinence do nothing to teach the kids about why they should abstain, namely, the sacredness of the institution of marriage, the dignity of the human person, and the nature of true love. This is why it is simply no good to have sex ed in schools, no matter what it is for.
Does it follow that knowledge
Does it follow that knowledge of the digestive system will cause gluttony?
Does it follow that knowledge of the respiratory system will cause people to smoke?
Does it follow that knowledge of the central nervous system will cause people to use illicit drugs?
Does it follow that knowledge of the reproductive systems (both male and female) will cause promiscuity?
Of course not!
Rather it will increase a sense of wonder of what marvels they are!
Paracelsus once wrote: "He who knows nothing can do nothing...He who thinks that all fruits ripen with the strawberries knows nothing about grapes... He who knows nothing is useless...But he who knows: he sees and he loves!"
Lack of knowledge is ignorance.
If parents and clergymen will not provide knowledge about sex (and by and large they don't), then the classroom is the next best place to learn about it.
Ignorance produces disaster -- not respect for life, or ourself, or for others.
If you were a little less
If you were a little less biased you might realize Catholics are interested in virtue not acting on impulses. You might also assume that Dolan has lived chastely and grown in that virtue. Thus, he does have experience to offer.
I think Dolan has a lot of
I think Dolan has a lot of experience to offer through his voluntary choice to accept chastity as a perpetual vow for the benefit of all his flock. That's more than what this self-centered and hypocritical world offers today. I think he has the experience that comes through all the confessions he's heard over the years, and 2.000 years of firm doctrine, which gives him a better sense of reality than many of us posses (including myself, with my accumulated failures). Finally I think he's got more authority as a bishop of the Catholic Church than anyone employed in any and all school districts in this country to talk about this subject, considering the more dangerous track record the school districts have compared to the "dreaded" Catholic Church in regards to child abuse. On that issue, please see the following links :
http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/misconductreview/report.pdf
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/04/07/mean-men.html
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/mora/
http://blog.archny.org/?p=625
http://blog.beliefnet.com/deaconsbench/2010/04/dershowitz-in-defense-of-...
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/us-adults-overestimate-homosexual-po...
The first link is to a US ordered report about this subject in the school system nationwide, and it is startling: 10% to 20% of school employees are responsible for these attacks on minors. This percentage by far exceeds the roughly 4% of priests that have been either accused or convicted of this crime. Leave the kids alone! We, the parents, do not want you talking about sex education; that is our prerogative!
These comments by the AB just
These comments by the AB just re-confirm how out-of-touch the hierarchy is with real life. I almost called him 'dumb' because as a parent I know what he says about sex being all around us is so true and kids will learn it all by osmosis. So I see the realistic solution as the RCC taking the lead and teaching real sex education along the lines the Mayor proposes; not the truncated, moralistic teachings the RCC calls sex ed but sex ed based on the daily, human reality of sex. Something positive instead of the re-curring negatives the RCC has to say about sex.
Yes, I know my suggestion clashes with RCC doctrine but doctrine can be taught along with real sex ed which is as much biology, if not more so than doctrine. And if the AB walked a few blocks in NYC he couldn't help but see how unwanted and teen pregnancies often ruin young women's lives and babies do not get the love and attention they deserve and need. Until the RCC starts to understand this better and that sex and sex ed is not black and white but a real part of life (life which clerics are effectively isolated from no matter how much they protest this is not true), I prefer secular programs because they at least provide some education instead of fostering ignorance.
Moral parents, who set moral
Moral parents, who set moral standards for themselves and their children to live by, yield good results in developing moral, young adults who have respect for others. We all know this to be true; both innately and statistically.
But many of today's parents are simply too selfish and uncaring of their children; leaving government law to attempt to accomplish what sufficient love and sacrifice on their part could have done, with far better benefits to society. Shame on you all for being so weak.
An Inconvenient
An Inconvenient Truth.
Inconvenient for the NCR liberals:
New York City, home of legalized mass murder.
100,000 abortions in New York every year. More than Hiroshima and Hagaskai.
Over 4 million innocent children killed by legal abortion. Social Justice.
As bad as abortion is (and by
As bad as abortion is (and by the way, I truly believe it is evil), we live in a society in which laws are secular, not religious.
We do not have the right to place Catholic morals into a public school system, any more than a Muslim organization cannot demand that Sharia law be practiced or taught in public schools.
The bishop is correct that we catholics ought to teach sex education to our children. If abortion rates are high, it is the fault of the parents, not the school system.
As for the glowing review they give the Italian system - anyone who as spent as much time as I have in Italy knows that the sexual mores in Rome are at least as bad as those in the US.
The Vatican and Dolan know
The Vatican and Dolan know full well that one out of two unplanned pregnancies is a potential future priest and that the other half of the equation is a potential mother of a future priest........
I went to catholic middle
I went to catholic middle school, public high school for 2 years, and catholic high school for 2 years. I had sex-ed classes in middle school and again in public high school. I can tell you right now that they don't have any real effect on students. The people who were going to have sex did it, and the people who weren't didn't. It's no surprise when the amount of guidance supplied is: Wrap A with B, insert A into C. Congrats! Now you are normal and healthy! Now take a test so we can check off that you can correctly label all the parts! Go get 'em tiger!
That doesn't teach someone how to live with their biology or what it means in the grand scheme of things. Only the RCC seems to provide that and sure enough, despite being armed with the finest sex-ed the state had to offer, I had many more pregnant peers in public high school than in catholic high school. Which is to say nothing of the numbers who were having sex well before any real maturity level.
The biggest charge that can be made against the RCC is that they haven't been bold enough or perhaps effective enough in proclaiming their vision of the human person. My parents taught me some of it and the rest I read on my own because the catholic schools I had the misfortune of attending were on the same page as the secular ones; mechanics only.
Traditionally ignorance has never been the Catholic way. If you have that impression, you probably grew up in the 70's... and for that I am truly sorry.
Agreed, but this is a moral
Agreed, but this is a moral choice that we Catholics make for ourselves - not one that we can force onto others who do not share the faith.
That would be like a Mormon insisting that schools don't allow coffee or other caffeinated drinks in the school because it is against their values.
Archbishop Dolan is correct
Archbishop Dolan is correct about this subject. The statistics do not support the efficacy of sex education in the public schools and they do not teach the risks associated with hormonal contraception, abortion. Nor do they teach about the exploitation of girls psychologically. The hooking-up culture is nothing to be supported in any fashion, no matter the claim of wanting to at least do something. These classes may be done as a good intention with a bad idea and the fact they are a bad idea is not changed by the intention. Out of touch is the idea that it is OK to tell kids it is OK to go ahead and risk getting sexually transmitted diseases that condoms can not be relied on to prevent. Failure of such methods to fully protect must be assumed especially in the teenage population. Should we have a show of hands how many who criticise the good Archbishop want their kids, grandkids, nieces or nephews to contract a sexually transmitted disease before graduating high school? Just in case you want the facts on many of these go to http://www.cdc.gov/std/
It really is important to consider all the facts before condemning the good Archbishop.
It is true that the family
It is true that the family should be given the major role in the education of the kids, especially regarding sexual matters. Is the family still that solid, unified and coherent? Life has become so modern post-modern that the tradition place given to the family is eroded in many ways and in many countries. But I do not think that the school necessarily "usurps" the role of parents and the family. If the school is Catholic, then it can be guided according to Church principles and pedagogy. There is work to be done on both sides--family and school.
Why would anyone ever turn to
Why would anyone ever turn to the Vatican and/or the Bishops on matters of sex and sexuality???!!!
Send them all to attend those public school courses.
More Spin from the Vatican
More Spin from the Vatican U.S. Press Officer.
Society in general has taken
Society in general has taken any thought or logic regarding morality and thrown it out the window ... along with helpless children who are murdered every year in the womb.
“The problem is more
“The problem is more upstream, in education and therefore in the family.”
This is an obvious truth - if adolescents do not have a family and home that supports them and teaches them why sexual relationships as a teenager is a bad idea for many reasons, it is far more likely that these teens will have sex and be exposed both to disease and to pregnancy. Since so many young people do not have these advantages, it is even more important to give them comprehensive sex education, stressing that delaying sexual activity is to their good.
"Scaraffia asserts that Italy, which does not have a mandatory sex ed curriculum in its public schools, has comparatively low rates of sexually transmitted disease among adolescents and low rates of teen pregnancy. She attributes that not only to the role of Italian families, but also the Catholic church."
However, she fails to note that the rates of disease and teen pregnancy in Italy are similar to those in both Sweden and Japan (only two examples - there are many others). In western Europe, the lowest rates for STDs for teens, and teen pregnancy are in the Netherlands. Those countries do not have the Catholic church involved, but they do have comprehensive sex education. These realities suggest that both Dolan and Ms.Scaraffia are over-simplifying. Netherlands, Germany, Italy and several other countries have much lower rates of unmarried teen pregnancy/disease/births than is the case in some traditionally Catholic countries such as Ireland.
In the US, the rate of teen births is the lowest it has been in 70 years. In looking more closely at the breakdowns, one sees that the overall rate includes wide disparities among sub-groups, primarily according to economic class. Unfortunately those with the least income and the poorest educational opportunities tend to have the highest rates of STDs, pregnancy, abortions, and births among teens. These teenagers generally do not have the kind of stable, loving, supportive families that Scaraffia refers to, and which most teens in Sweden and the Netherlands also have. They are not supported in making positive decisions by the overall culture, as is the case in Japan. It is thus extremely important to comprehensively educate these teenagers about sexuality, sex, all forms of family planning, with an emphasis on abstinence but not excluding information about birth control, disease, emotional and physical repercussions of early sex, especially to the girls, and the lifelong negative impacts of having children as an unmarried teen-age girl with no financial, family, or community resources and support. They need to be taught self-respect, that they are worthwhile human beings, that they can say "no". They need to be taught the tools they can use in order to be able to stand up for themselves and be taught a process for making positive decisions- unfortunately many do not have good examples at home. They need to be given hope that there is a real future available to them if they stay in school and prepare for a life that isn't supported by welfare checks. Studies done in the US over the last 20 years do not provide consistently clear results and conclusions regarding the "most" effective types of sex education (and some outcomes are clearly influenced by the realities of family lives, community, and economic situation that individual young people experience). But, generally it seems that comprehensive sex education is the most successful in encouraging young people to postpone sexual activity, and in protecting them once they do begin to have sexual relationships - more successful than sex ed that focuses exclusively on contraception and disease prevention without discussing moral or ethical considerations and the desirability of abstinence, and also more successful than those that concentrate exclusively on abstinence and provide no information about modern contraceptives. The "virginity" pledges that many Christian groups encourage their teens to sign seem to be effective in delaying sexual activity by about 18 months compared to those of similar backgrounds who did not sign such a pledge. Those who signed such a pledge generally do not engage in 'first sex" until their later teen years, and have "first sex" at about the same age as teenagers in the Netherlands and France, which is later than in the US.
Bishop Dolan needs to come out of the ivory tower and deal with reality, not utopia.
Thank you friend anonymous
Thank you friend anonymous for your well balanced presentation. I go along with you 100%. But ¿where does one begin?
Here in our Nicaragua, the Ministry of Education of our revolutionary government together with the UNESCO worked up an excellent sex-ed school plan complete with books, shortly after we were able to retire from “Reagan’s Dirty War against Nicaragua” at the end the 1980’s. This war cost the lives of some 50,000 of our young people, and some 37 billion dollars of war damages which were never paid by the USA even though the World Court had legally declared this war-indemnity in favor of Nicaragua.
Then when the non-revolutionary neo-liberal government was voted into power in 1990, this plan was scuttled through the strong political influence of our Catholic Hierarchy. The school-books were destroyed and today Nicaragua is gloriously #1 for teen-age pregnancies in all of our Latin America - and that’s saying a mouthful.
“To make the cheese more binding” as we used to say in Wisconsin, in the year 2006, the Catholic Church Hierarchy with their powerful political klaut despite our religiously “non-confessional” national Constitution, pushed through our national congress a new law, penalizing by prison anyone involved in a “therapeutic abortion”, thus nullifying our 100 year old permissive legislation. The topping on the cake came shortly after with the public declaration by our Archbishop that “all abortions are direct abortions”.
Today since our national statistics are not all that great, it is difficult to say precisely just how many of our mothers of family since then have died for lack of medical solutions to ordinary reproductive problems.
As a “ still practicing Catholic” – 37 years as a Capuchin/Franciscan religious; 25 years as a “missionary priest” among the campesinos and indigenous on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua and now 32 years in our ecclesiastically valid marriage and father of two daughters: in my modest opinion, this Dolan person and his likes including the Vatican, fall under the common sense adage of my daddy to me as a recently ordained priest: “You have it easy talking from behind your stone walls”.
Justiniano de Managua 2 de sept. 2011
I choose education. Children
I choose education. Children should be taught about sex. I think every child should be educated about the conjugal life and its gifts by parents, the primary educators of children. Push the Church out of your sex life and invite the some 3rd party into your childrens.
The pendulum has swung the
The pendulum has swung the other way according to some of these comments. In the 50s and 60s when I was in Catholic schools, the guiding principle was 'in loco parentis', that is, the schools were to act in place of the parents.
Lucetta Scaraffia,one of the
Lucetta Scaraffia,one of the most perspicacious columnists in the official Vatican newspaper, quite rightly backs up Cardinal Dolan in his well-placed criticisms of the current Sex-ed program in NY schools. Programs which only deal with the mechanics of sex with little values-based content, are bound to give kids the green-light in their heads to experiment as much as they like with the resultant depressing societal statistics. This reality can be seen in the case of the UK which has the highest teen-pregnancy rate in Europe, which is hovering around 41.9 conceptions per 1,000. The consistent policy of recent UK governments has been to insist that the widespread application of the contraceptive pill and condoms along with explicit sexual instruction within the school curriculums for both young kids and teenagers, will bring the numbers down. This has backfired somewhat in terms of strategy and goals.
The Catholic approach to sex education is more broad based and healthier for the whole human person. It appreciates the integrity and value of each human being in relation how they react to each other within the overall context of the Christian gospel. Of course there must be content in relation to the biological aspects of sex but this can still be handled within the Catholic framework. Naturally the family should be the first learning center for kids regarding these matters but sadly the splintered nature of the family unit in western society often makes this an faint hope.
If the Vatican has anything
If the Vatican has anything to offer on this subject all, it needs to look within itself.
Carmelo Abbate, investigative journalist whose recent book Sex and the Vatican has without realizing it, confirmed what many have conjected for who knows how long.
I do add, he hasn't been charged with defamation or threats of libel action to date.
The bordello lifestyle and illegitimate children of clergy with no legal rights, living a subverted life, is nothing more than blasphemous for a City of God, with not too many fathers seeking a Rescript of Vows according to Canon 1139, to give their child and the mother who bore them the respect that is due to motherhood, but happy to continue using the female as an object of their desires of the flesh paying them for services rendered and to keep them quiet.
The children of no account, with sex-abuse rampant throughout the world, is it any wonder.
Speaking of sex education,
Speaking of sex education, here’s a bit of an interesting tidbit I picked up today that I think you may also find a fun read: http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/showlink.aspx?bookmarkid=U3XC0N...
Cheers!
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