Sex-Ed in Catholic Schools
From Voice of the Family’s Analysis of Life to the Full , the Relationships and Sex Education programme adopted by the Catholic Education Service on behalf of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales.
by Mr. John Smeaton & Mr. Peter Newman
Introduction
A nominally Catholic Media Company, Ten Ten Resources, has developed a morally dangerous Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) programme entitled Life to the Full, reportedly used in over 80% of Catholic schools in England and Wales in 2023–24. Life to the Full contradicts Catholic teaching on faith and morals, undermines parents as the primary educators of their children and exposes children to occasions of sin. Parents who object to the programme, or simply request to view the materials — as is their legal right — are all too often silenced by school authorities, who assure them that it is approved by the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Education Service (CES), an agency of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, describe Ten Ten as ‘a trusted organisation, widely used by hundreds of Catholic primary schools, secondary schools and parishes throughout the UK, delivering Relationship and Sex Education Resources to tens of thousands of children and young people every year.
Ten Ten states that ‘for years [it] has been working in partnership with almost all Catholic dioceses in England and Wales, as well as the CES, to create a fully-resourced scheme of work that will not only meet the new statutory guidance but will provide a truly faith-based programme.’
This last claim does not take account of the fact that Catholic teaching is repeatedly abandoned, subverted and contradicted in the programme, including but not limited to every instance in which it would bring Catholic bishops into conflict with the UK Government’s ‘learning objectives’, as set out in the Department for Education’s statutory guidance.1 The requirements of this document clearly intend that, by the time children leave school, they will regard contraception, abortion, same-sex ‘marriage’ and transgenderism as positive life choices, which do not admit of moral objection either on the part of the Church or on that of parents who delegate to the school their right to educate their children.
Appallingly, the statutory guidance is reflected in the Life to the Full programme in many ways.
Catholic teaching on basic morality misrepresented or entirely omitted
Cohabitation
In one video for 13–14-year-olds, a Catholic priest says of cohabitation, ‘the Catholic Church is never, never in the business of saying “you must, you should, you ought”’.
Civil partnerships, same-sex unions and transgenderism
In a video for 9–11-year-olds, the presenters speak approvingly of laws enforcing civil partnerships, same-sex unions, and transgenderism, concluding that ‘these protected characteristics are really good’.
Same-sex couples and adoption
A video for 12–13-year-olds gives the impression that the only grave sin that the Church associates with homosexuality is prejudice against homosexual people. Any conflict between the Catholic faith and liberal secular thinking is tacitly denied, whilst any breach of the Equality Act 2010 or the Human Rights Act 1998 is denounced with passionate indignation and emotive rhetoric:
‘Deliberately mocking someone, belittling them, telling them they don’t belong, or that they are weird because of how they are or how they choose to express themselves: now that is a sin.’
‘Telling someone that they are a sinner just for simply experiencing same-sex attraction is a lie.’
‘Passing judgment on someone as if you were God is wrong.’
‘And bullying, including homophobic bullying, is a sin: it’s wrong and it’s shameful.’
In contrast to these truisms, which present no stumbling block to secular thinking, there is no exposition of the destructiveness of homosexual acts to the familial, social and supernatural reality to which man is ordered, for which homosexual acts have justly been counted among four sins crying to heaven for vengeance. No mention is made either of the Church’s condemnation of the adoption of children by homosexual couples or of the biological and anthropological elements of marriage and family entirely lacking in homosexual unions.
Transgenderism
Another video for 12–13-year-olds features a comparison between the sane approach to sexual differences between men and women with the propositions of gender ideology. Although the weight of the argument is clearly on the side of common sense, the discussion concludes, ‘There is no blueprint for you.’ No mention is made either of Catholic teaching that so-called ‘gender transition’ is morally illicit or of the spiritual, psychological and physiological destructiveness of gender ideology. As this is one of the major threats to young people today, one would expect a programme adopted by the Catholic Education Service on behalf of Catholic bishops to deal with it in some detail.
Abortion
A video for 14–15-year-olds urges pupils to ‘develop [their] own values and attitudes related to the topic’. At one point, the presenter says, ‘Many consider the mother to be the most vulnerable … The baby inside the womb has no legal rights until he or she is born, and so many consider the unborn child to be vulnerable as well.’
Humanity of the unborn brought into question
On various occasions in Life to the Full, the scientific fact that a new human individual comes into being at the moment of conception is presented as a Christian belief and just one possible position among many. In a video for 14–15-year-olds, the presenter says:
‘This is not simply a legal question, it’s a question of belief. As we said before, we’re going to give you the Christian perspective on these matters alongside other perspectives, so you’re better informed to make your own decisions. The Christian perspective is that life begins at conception.’
By presenting the biological reality of the life of an unborn child as a matter of Christian belief rather than an irrefutable scientific fact, the programme subjectivises the fundamental moral issue of the right to life of the unborn child, giving children the opportunity to reject objective reality as one point of view among others.
Contraception
In a video for 13–14-year-olds, a doctor explains to one of the presenters various types of contraception and their relative merits and demerits in terms of efficacy and ease of use.
Promiscuity and solitary sins
A video for 9–11-years-olds features a dramatisation in which a father confronts his son who has watched pornography online, saying, ‘The reason you went back and looked at those images again is not because you’re bad or naughty but because your brain was tricked … one side of your brain anyway … What, you didn’t know your brain had two sides? …’ While trying, perhaps, to raise a serious point about the addictiveness of online pornography, any moral dimension is explicitly denied and then explained away with a brief exposition of pop science.
Rights of parents as primary educators undermined and children referred to ideological institutions
The Life to the Full programme repeatedly promotes Childline, a registered charity which provides children with confidential advice on accessing abortion and contraception. Childline is run by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and is strongly committed to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) agenda.2
Having been signposted to Childline throughout the programme, children who visit the website are encouraged to question their gender identity. On one Childline page, children are told, ‘It’s important to remember that nobody can define your sexuality except you’, and young people are offered a choice of thirty different ‘genders’ to which they might belong.
Repeated signposting to Childline is a particularly dangerous aspect of the Life to the Full programme, which can only serve to facilitate children’s acceptance of and access to contraception and abortion, and gender ideologues’ access to and influence over children.
Children’s best defence against occasions of sin broken down
The Life to the Full programme recklessly exposes children to occasions of sin from primary school right through to the senior years of secondary school. Vulgar content is used to break down children’s natural reserve and resistance to classroom discussion of physically and emotionally intimate matters. Among other things, this content includes patronising antics from the presenters, disregarding all propriety between the sexes; a series of dramatisations — styled as a soap opera — about children in the upper years of primary school (no less demeaning for the children than for the adults involved); and one blasphemous skit which takes place in a church, apparently before the Blessed Sacrament and with the participation of a real priest.
Conclusion
The content of the Life to the Full programme, shocking as it is, might reasonably be seen as the natural development of a reversal of policy by the authorities of the Catholic Church in recent decades, resulting for the first time in the promotion of classroom sex education. The programme reflects the fundamental error on the part of bishops: the voluntary renouncement of their authority and responsibility in pronouncing on matters of faith and morals, especially where this would inevitably bring them into conflict with the secular authorities. By refusing to exercise their own teaching authority, bishops have undermined the authority of parents, permitted the authority of the state to be grossly exaggerated and made inroads for adults external to the family — and to the Catholic faith — to teach children about human sexuality without regard for the end to which God has ordered it. This is a grave error, as explained by the 16th-century Cardinal Silvio Antoniano, cited by Pope Pius XI in his 1929 encyclical, Divini illius magistri, on Christian education:
‘For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity.’3
The same encyclical shows, in sharp contrast to the appalling recklessness of Church policy as developed in recent decades, the extreme caution demanded by the perennial teaching of the Church of anyone teaching a child about human sexuality in loco parentis, as faithfully expressed by Pope Pius XI:
‘In this extremely delicate matter, if, all things considered, some private instruction is found necessary and opportune, from those who hold from God the commission to teach and who have the grace of state, every precaution must be taken. Such precautions are well known in traditional Christian education, and are adequately described by Antoniano cited above, when he says:
‘“Such is our misery and inclination to sin, that often in the very things considered to be remedies against sin, we find occasions for and inducements to sin itself. Hence it is of the highest importance that a good father, while discussing with his son a matter so delicate, should be well on his guard and not descend to details, nor refer to the various ways in which this infernal hydra destroys with its poison so large a portion of the world; otherwise it may happen that instead of extinguishing this fire, he unwittingly stirs or kindles it in the simple and tender heart of the child. Speaking generally, during the period of childhood it suffices to employ those remedies which produce the double effect of opening the door to the virtue of purity and closing the door upon vice.”’4
Pope Pius XI envisaged that Catholic parents should ‘agitate’ for authentic Catholic teaching in schools to ensure that ‘the various branches of secular learning will not enter into conflict with religious instruction to the manifest detriment of education’.5 With prophetic realism, he warned that, whilst young people cannot be removed from the society in which they must live and save their souls, ‘they should be forewarned and forearmed as Christians against the seductions and the errors of the world’.6
The same authentic teaching of the Church is discernible in the words of Cardinal von Galen, the Bishop of Münster, who, at the height Hitler’s power, denounced the injustices of the Reich ‘crying out to heaven’. In words which reverberate uncannily in 21st-century Britain, the holy bishop urged parents not to neglect their ‘most sacred duty’ to resist the ‘false teachings and morals’ to which the German youth were being subjected:
‘We are the anvil, not the hammer! Unfortunately you cannot shield your children, the noble but still untempered crude metal, from the hammer-blows of hostility to the Faith and hostility to the Church. But the anvil also plays a part in forging. Let your family home, your parental love and devotion, your exemplary Christian life be the strong, tough, firm and unbreakable anvil which absorbs the force of the hostile blows, which continually strengthens and fortifies the still weak powers of the young in the sacred resolve not to let themselves be diverted from the direction that leads to God.’7
View all articles from Ite Missa Est.
- 1
Department for Education, Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education Statutory guidance for governing bodies, proprietors, head teachers, principals, senior leadership teams, teachers (2019) pp 20–22, 27–29.
- 2
James Esses, ‘How Childline was captured by trans ideology’, The Spectator, 8th January 2023.
- 3
Pius XI, Divini illius magistri (1929), 54.
- 4
Ibid, 67.
- 5
Ibid, 86.
- 6
Ibid, 92.
- 7
Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, Sermon (Liebfrauenkirche, Münster, Germany, 20 July 1941).