Vatican paper: sex education is unhelpful

BY STAFF REPORTER
THE CHURCH may be painted as oldfashioned and callous when it comes to sex education but governments that introduce it in schools are fooling themselves about its effectiveness, the Vatican newspaper has said.
Writing on the front page of ’ Osservatore Romano, Lucetta Scaraffia looked specifically at New York City, where students in middle school and high school will be required to attend a term-long course in sex education.
Prof Scaraffia, a historian at Rome’s La Sapienza University and a contributor to the Vatican newspaper, said that “to avoid religious controversy, chastity will be cited among birth control methods and teachers will have to speak about sex with some caution” in the New York courses.
But she pointed out that Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York criticised the mandatory programme for usurping the rights of parents to educate their children in line with their beliefs and values.
The situation has been repeated several times, Prof Scaraffia wrote. “The state decides to include compulsory sexual education in schools, and the Catholic Church opposes it, earning the image of an obscurantist force, cruel because of its indifference to the consequences its refusal could have among young people that is, unwanted pregnancies and disease,” she said.
“It is not clear why public institutions in the West continue to have such magical trust in the effectiveness of sex education,” especially when young people in those countries continue to have precocious, unprotected sex, leading to an increase of disease, pregnancy and abortion, Prof Scaraffia said.
In Italy, where there is no mandatory sex education in school, there was a low risk of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease among the young, she said.
“This is thanks to the family, to the loving vigilance of parents over their children, to the fact that kids are not left to themselves with a box of contraceptives as the only defence against their passions and mistakes.
“It is also thanks to the Catholic Church, which continues to teach that sexual relations are more than some kind of pleasurable exercise to be practised in an unbridled and riskfree way,” Prof Scaraffia wrote.
For the Church, she said, sexual activity was an important part of human and spiritual maturity and belongs only to marriage and the formation of a family. “The Church teaches respect for one’s own body, which means giving importance and weight to the acts that are done with it, not just taking into consideration the possibility of enjoyment or narcissistic gratification,” she said.