Vatican Book on Sexuality Gives ‘Parental Rights’ a Boost

The “parental rights” movement in the United States has gained an unintended boost from the Roman Catholic Church.

In a new book on human sexuality, the church advises parents to become more involved in their children’s education, to the extent of keeping them out of school if they are unhappy with sex education programs.

“It is recommended that parents attentively follow every form of sex education that is given to their children outside the home, removing their children whenever this education does not correspond to their own principles,” says the new Vatican book, “The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality.”

The 60-page tract was produced by the Pontifical Council for the Family after 11 years of study and in response to the growing dissatisfaction among Catholic parents on how sex education is taught in public schools.

Although the book is intended for global distribution, it appears to be aimed particularly at Western societies, including the United States. The guidelines are expected to find favor among American religious conservatives--including many Catholics--who are unhappy with the way public schools teach sexuality.

The church says removing children from classes that are too open about sexual matters should be done only after other appeals fail. But the emphasis on a parent’s right, or duty, is in line with a nationwide effort in the United States to win approval of so-called parental rights amendments, which have been introduced in 20 state legislatures--including California’s--and are being prepared in nine others.

“This book couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Dale O’Leary, a Providence, R.I., activist for Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian advocacy group that is among those promoting the amendments. “I’m very excited about this. We will use it to make our case.”

Many of the amendments being proposed are phrased in general language. Several of them read: “The right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children shall not be infringed.”

Supporters say the measures are needed to keep the government from intruding in personal aspects of their children’s education, and to offer parents a wider range of choices in the course work available in school districts, including home schooling.

Opponents fear that the broad language of such laws could prevent welfare agencies from inquiring about alleged child abuse at home.

Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, secretary of the Vatican council, wrote the sexuality book with Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the council. Sgreccia said the study was prompted by parents who complained that sex education classes did not focus enough on morality.

“We have received many complaints about common approaches [taught in schools], and we have been asked to take a stand,” Sgreccia said. “This is a role that parents must not give up.”

The book reiterates the views of Pope John Paul II, criticizes school programs that teach about “safe sex,” such as the use of condoms, and calls masturbation and homosexuality “disorders.” It reaffirms chastity outside of marriage and virginity before marriage.

Because the Catholic Church forbids all forms of artificial birth control, the book says that teenagers can be taught only about “the natural regulation of fertility” and only in the context of fidelity in marriage.

The authors say parents should exercise control over their children’s sex education by meeting with teachers, supplementing school course work with lessons at home and banding with like-minded parents “to fight against damaging forms of sex education.”

Information that children receive about sexuality through the mass media is typically “depersonalized, recreational and often pessimistic,” the authors say, and is “influenced by a distorted individualistic concept of freedom, in an ambience lacking the basic values of life, human love and the family.”