Church is attacked on sex lessons

Ulster group condemns official line
BY joE jarak N
AN ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE Catholic pressure group was condemned this week by Church authorities in Northern Ireland after it tried to discredit the integrity of sex education in Catholic primary schools.
Education for Chastity Family Support Group, based in Dungannon, County Tyrone, this week attacked 'Education for Love' the Church's official sex education programme in Northern Ireland.
"It's far too explicit and intimate", said Kathleen McQuaid, spokeswoman for the organisation. "It encourages children to experiment and leads to abuse of children by other children."
However, Church educationalist Fr John Forsythe of St Malachy's College, Belfast, one of the architects behind the programme,
dismissed Education for Chastity as "a very rightwing, extremist pressure group" which was not representative of the views of Catholic parents. 'We cannot run this programme without parents," he told the Herald.
Fr Forsythe said that Irish Bishops are likely to condemn Education for Chastity in the near future and that St Mary's College, Belfast, where the programme was developed in 1992, had already considered taking legal action against the group.
A leaflet produced by Education for Chastity claims that children, by the age of 10, "will have received information on periods, seminal fluid, erection, ejaculation, "sexual" intercourse and "making love", and the children are asked to complete explicit worksheets on most of these topics."
The programme, piloted in primary schools during the 1992-93 academic year, listed a series of BBC sex education videos as support material for the course, but has since voiced disapproval of the series and favours the ITV alternative. In the leaflet, Education for Chastity highlights a tenuous link between the BBC videos and the Church's sex education. Some of the most outspoken critics of Church teaching acted as advisers to the BBC series, including The Brook Advisory Centres, The Sex Education Forum, The Black Lesbian and Gay Centre and The Family Planning Association.
The leaflet also refers to guidelines of the Pontifical Council for the Family which warn parents of "secularised and anti-natalist sex education which puts God at the margin of life and regards the birth of a child as a threat," promoting "abortion, sterilization and contraception."
Fr Forsythe provided the Herald with statements by parents and children familiar with Education for Love, expressing their support of the programme.
One mother said: "I was glad my daughter learnt this in a classroom environment. It wasn't so embarrassing for me. When she came home she showed me what she had learnt and then we talked. I am really glad I let her follow this series in school."