RSE Recommendations – “Right” for State to Corrupt Our Children.

RSE Recommendations – “Right” for State to Corrupt Our Children.

On the 3rd April 2018, then Minister for Education, Richard Bruton, announced that he had commissioned the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) to undertake a comprehensive review of the Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) programme in primary and post-primary schools in Ireland. The report of the NCCA is due to be released in the first half of this year.

In advance of this NCCA Report, the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills (comprised of selected TDs and Senators) issued its own report on RSE on the 29th January past, making a total of 24 recommendations to the country’s legislators.

An RSE Curriculum that “needs updating” and “is no longer reflective of society today”.

Among other things, the Committee wants the SPHE curriculum to be updated and “delivered to children at an earlier age”, specifically “at primary level”. It even goes so far as to recommend “that an interdepartmental approach to Sexuality Education and Health is taken in the form of a strategy for young people and children from 0-18"! This proposed new curriculum, it says, should “give consideration to the significant and welcome [sic] changes that have taken place in Ireland” and should be delivered by “outside providers…regulated by the DES [Department of Education and Skills] or the HSE”.

How does the Committee believe these “welcome changes” should be reflected in the updated programme? Firstly, it would involve giving “our young people the skills they need, particularly in the areas of consent and contraception”. Secondly, “any updated SPHE and RSE programme [must] be fully inclusive of LGBTQI+ relationships and experiences including sexual orientation, gender identity and the spectrums thereof…” It goes on to say that “LGBT relationships” should be presented “without distinction as to their heterosexual counterparts”. To ensure compliance from all schools, the Committee recommends “including the LGBTQI+ programme in whole-school inspections”.

An attack on children’s innocence and morality, as well as the independence of Catholic schools.

These proposed measures clearly run counter to the Church’s Teachings and represent a serious danger to the innocence of children and to their eventual correct understanding of the God-given purposes of sexual relationships (i.e. the procreation of children and the mutual support of spouses within marriage alone).

The Committee shows in its report that it is acutely aware of this opposition with Catholic principles. It is not content with the fact that many so-called Catholic schools the length and breadth of the country are already, in practice, implementing scandalous sexual education courses in both primary and post-primary sectors (particularly, but not only, through their open and active promotion of the LGBT agenda). Instead, it wants to close any possible loophole by forcing every school to teach the RSE course content without any reference to ethos. Recommendation Number 14 of the Report states: “The Committee recommends that the necessary legislative amendments required to remove the role of ethos as a barrier to the objective and factual delivery of the RSE and SPHE curriculums be made as soon as possible and at the latest by the end of 2019”.

In other words, by the end of this calendar year at the very latest, Catholic schools will be obliged by law to deliver a course which conflicts in principle with their ethos. This is an open attack on the right and duty of parents to send their children to a school which upholds Catholic principles. It is also an attack on the independence of Catholic schools, for, if the State’s opinion on a given matter at a given time can override a school’s ethos, “ethos” has become a meaningless word. Every school in the country will be, in effect, a State school.

All about giving the State the “right” to corrupt children.

All of this is proposed in the name of false rights of the child, which are opposed to those of Catholic parents and schools. As Minister Bruton stated when commissioning the NCCA Report last year: “Every student has a right to access information about sexual health, relationships and sexuality, and this must be delivered in a factual manner in every school”. In reality, however, it is about giving the State the undisputable “right” to corrupt children from the earliest age.

Irish Catholics must resist this latest attack on the innocence and morality of our children. Parents must be aware of what their children are being taught in schools and what influences they are being subjected to on a daily basis (even if these recommendations were never to receive force of law, so-called Catholic schools are already corrupting influences). The warning of Our Lord - “he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea" – applies not only to those who actively corrupt, but also to those who allow children to be corrupted when they could have prevented it.

Finally, and most importantly, we must keep in mind that this latest attack must be seen as part of the battle between Satan and God which has been raging since the beginning of time. Innocent children are at the same time most dear to God and most hated by Satan. But, in Genesis, just after the Fall of Adam, God warned Satan that he would be crushed and defeated by the heel of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Let us then confidently invoke Our Blessed Lady, particularly under the title of “Our Lady of Guadalupe, Protectress of the Innocence of Children”, to protect our Irish children from corruption.