Update on the Ontario Catholic AIDS curriculum.

In our June 1998 issue we printed the protest by Bishop Roman Danylak about sex and religious education programs in Catholic schools. In the month before, we summarized the protests of various parents groups of the newly proposed AIDS curriculum. What has happened since?

The Ontario Bishops' Conference has struck a special committee to study the controversial AIDS program, but revisions--and it appears there will be some--will not be forthcoming until the spring of 1999, says OCCB executive secretary Tom Reilly.

Mr. Reilly couldn't divulge which bishops are on the committee, commenting only that there were "several" and that they like to work "quietly."

Meanwhile, the AIDS program still has episcopal approval, Mr Reilly told Catholic Insight. "The bishops vouch for the faith dimension," he said, and the Institute for Catholic Education (ICE) vouches for the pedagogical aspect. As it stands, the program has been approved on both counts. It is up to individual school boards to decide whether or not to use the curriculum, which has come under fire from parents' groups.

In his statement, Bishop Danylak rejected the American-produced, and Canadian-modified, curriculum entitled A Catholic Educational Approach to AIDS/HIV. "Because of errors in doctrine and methodology and serious omissions, I ask that the current AIDS program be withdrawn," he stated in our June 1998 issue, page 15, in the policy statement For our children and for us all.

Parents are alarmed by what appears in the curriculum to be a subtle acceptance of homosexuality (see CI, Dec. 1997, and May 1998); particularly upsetting is the suggestion to invite members of groups such as P-FLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Gays and Lesbians), a homosexual advocacy group, into classrooms.

Bishop Danylak was supporting the efforts of parents in Ottawa, Toronto, and elsewhere, to drop the curriculum.

AIDS education presents "a fly in the ointment," the OCCB's Reilly said, because it has been mandated by the government. Boards must implement some kind of curriculum and he says it is hoped they will use a Catholic program as opposed to a secular version. The directive from the department came in 1987 and there is already an AIDS awareness section in the Fully Alive family life program--which also has been strongly criticized by parents and by some bishops. Those latter include Bishop Danylak, who rejected the curriculum in his policy statement, and Bishop Basil Filevich, retired eparch of Saskatoon, as well as the religious education committee of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C.

After the Vatican's 1995 guidelines for family life education, The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality, were released, no attempt was made to bring Fully Alive into conformity with this document. The OCCB has endorsed the program and there appears to be no plan to amend the curriculum.