Open letter from John Nabeen to Mr. Alphonse Ainsworth, General Secretary, Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Almost from the moment the Fully Alive program began to be introduced into grades 1 and 2 of our Catholic elementary schools in 1988 (following pilot programs in 1986), and continuing through 1992-3 when it reached grade 8, concerned parents and other Catholics have been expressing their profound dissatisfaction with it. I should like to add my voice to theirs.

I agree with all the critics of those early days--and they include Ft. Alphonse de Valk, David Dooley, Msgr. Vincent Foy, the late Fr. John McGoey, Terry Snyder of Windsor, as well as the late Bishop Basil Filevich--who have charged this sexual education program with accommodating the culture rather than confronting it, and seeking its inspiration from Planned Parenthood through S.I.E.C.U.S, rather than from the Holy Spirit through Church teachings. Instead of lovingly protecting our children's years of innocence and sexual latency, this program carelessly tramples on them with its age-inappropriate concepts and explicit language. It is clinically candid about sexual technique, but reticent about the mystery of marital love. It shies away from teaching modesty and chastity, is silent about sin, but open to and non-judgmental about our sexualized cultural settings.

The Bishops were seriously wrong in approving this school-based "family life education" program, even with the understanding that it would be taught in partnership with home and church, and would include a Family Book for use by parents. In reality, of course, that crucial family component was quickly discarded by school boards and teachers, in clear violation of the Church's teaching--affirmed by Vatican II and re-affirmed by the 1995 Vatican guidelines, issued by the Pontifical Council for the Family, entitled The Truth and Meaning of Sexuality--that parents, as their children's primary teachers, may not be left out of decisions on what should and should not be taught in the classroom, and that there are aspects of human sexuality that should be left only to parents and not to schools.

I have taught students for over 30 years, the last sixteen in two of Windsor's Catholic high schools. I know from experience that a thorough Catholic perspective infusing all that is taught is largely absent from our curricula, and certainly from many a high school teacher's approach to his subject matter, that it is at best tacked on by some teachers here and there as an afterthought. Most teachers graduate from secular universities and have been trained at secular teachers' colleges; they have never learned another point of view but a secular one.

I know from personal observation that even--or especially--in Catholic Studies classes, orthodox Catholicism is often marginalized; its department heads and teachers are not infrequently dissident ex-nuns or insufficiently catechized lay people, or even malcontents with Church-related 'issues' to vent. Too often such teachers are reinforced in their dissent or their ignorance through participation in religious education workshops, led by notable dissenters.

I have seen teachers who do not agree with the Church placed on a first track to promotion, while their traditionalist colleagues are sidelined or kneecapped, career-wise. More than once, I have witnessed administrators deceive parents. The Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board's failure to issue the Fully Alive Family Book as mandated and refusal to tell anyone about it for years is one example; a Religious Studies Consultant's explanation in the late 80s that she could not provide me with a teacher's copy of the new (and even more problematic) AIDS program, on the grounds that it was not available yet, was another. I got one surreptitiously the next day through a friendlier contact.

Thankfully for students and their parents, many--perhaps most--teachers were so uncomfortable with this surrender to the homosexualist Zeitgeist, with its explicit references to the most perverted sexual practices, that they simply chucked it. In the case of Fully Alive, however, I strongly suspect the opposite is true: many elementary teachers are likely to consider themselves more knowledgeable about good old sex than the Catechism and the Church's moral teachings--or else they dissent from them. I'd have a nice little supplement to my pension, for instance, if I had received a dollar and invested it each time a student told me that he was informed in Religious or Health class that there is nothing wrong with masturbation.

I could go on with other examples, but what's the point? Or, rather, the point should be clear: even with the episcopally-mandated Family Book component, and even if taught by properly catechized teachers without a dissident axe to grind, the Fully Alive program is fatally flawed and should be ditched. It does not provide protection against our sexualized culture. At best, it flirts with it; at worst--in the hands of the wrong teachers and uninvolved parents--it surrenders, and hops in bed with it. It certainly fails to be the sign of contradiction needed to enlighten our children.

Well-informed Catholics have detailed its shortcomings far better than I can, in Catholic Insight, The Interim, and Challenge magazine. Now that the Catholic New Times has thankfully died and been buried, it is high time that our Shepherds consult those other publications to learn just what is wrong with the pastures on which their little lambs have been grazing. And move them onto greener and less toxic ones, like the Faith and Life program, in conjunction with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or its Compendium.

It is really a matter of common sense. Since its inception, Fully Alive has failed to halt the use and acceptance of contraceptives and pornography or the recourse to abortion, lower the number of single mothers or divorces, stop the spread and approval of the most unnatural homosexual demands, or increase respect for marriage, or, for that matter, for the Church for being 'cool' and 'with it.' It has not done a single part of its job so far. Chances are zilch that merely by dropping this program, things will get worse. So, drop it already. Nothing to lose but a loser of a program. And a very expensive one at that.

Windsor, ON

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