CUF and Sex Education

Pope Pius XI

From the beginning of Catholics United for the Faith, founder H. Lyman Stebbins realized that the introduction of formal sex education programs in Catholic schools—as well as in public schools—presented a grave risk to the faith and morals of millions of children and youth exposed to such programs.

There can be no question that in view of the Church’s traditional teaching and practice on the training of children, adolescents, and adults in modesty and chastity, the “new sex education” that had emerged in public and parochial schools was in direct conflict with the Church’s pedagogical norms. Pius XI’s classic encyclical on the Christian education of youth, Divini Illius Magistri (1929) had warned the Universal Church:

Another very grave danger is that naturalism which nowadays invades the field of education in that most delicate matter of purity of morals. Far too common is the error of those who with dangerous assurance and under an ugly term propagate a so-called sex education, falsely imagining they can forearm youths against the dangers of sensuality by means purely natural, such as a foolhardy initiation and precautionary instruction for all indiscriminately, even in public; and, worse still, by exposing them at an early age to the occasions, in order to accustom them, so it is argued, and as it were to harden them against such dangers.  (more...)

CUF and Sex Education