Written by Kathy Clubb
From worshipping in a mosque to getting sex ed from Mormons, Australia’s Catholic schools have definitely lost the plot. FLI has been reporting on this for years, and the situation is continuing to deteriorate.
Last year it came to light that a Perth primary school was supporting a six-year-old student in his ‘transition’ to a girl. Parents of other students had not been notified and were horrified to see their children’s classmate, a biological boy, return to school in a dress and ponytail.
Across the city, a Catholic high school showed similar signs of moral decay: its Grade 9 class on relationship education was found to be full of Safe-Schools-type content. Parents alerted the principal and teachers who had apparently ordered the online curriculum without checking its content. It was found to contain links to websites such as Family Planning Australia, the LGBTI-friendly Reach Out, a US-based site on gender transitioning and contained advice about how to have sex for the first time. The school threw out the programme and replaced it with something quite different: something vaguely Catholic, but which draws heavily on …. Mormonism.
Mormon Sex Ed?
A school has created a workbook on “Christian Love and Sexuality”. It contains very little Catholic content, almost no clear doctrine, and has many references to a Mormon curriculum called, “Come Follow Me.”
The unit starts with the assertion that the “human body is meant to serve as a means by which people express themselves.” By contrast, Catholic teaching tells us that the body is a means by which we work out our salvation during this earthly pilgrimage. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
“The human body shares in the dignity of “the image of God”: it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit.” [CCC 364.]
Students are asked to explain the meaning of sexual or gender identity in their own words and to describe and critique sexual experimentation. The course focuses on students’ self image, which is helpful to a point, but instead of filling the children’s minds with positive, Catholic ideals and examples, instead draws on role-models and plots from popular movies. So while there is no mention of Catholic role-models such as St. Maria Goretti, students are asked to watch an ad for the semi-pornographic Victoria’s Secret lingerie company.
One film the students are meant to evaluate is “Life as a House.” According to IMBD, this 2001 film contains 15 sex or nudity scenes, 18 scenes containing violence and gore, and alcohol or drugs and profanity. This hardly makes it appropriate for 14-year-old children.
Another movie that the programme recommends, and which exemplifies the Mormon connection is the film series, “Twilight.” Although held up by the course’s writers – and many Christian parents – as a great example of chastity, this movie is imbued with Mormon spirituality, which is clearly not Christian and especially not Catholic. And its many scenes of vampires interacting with humans are highly sexualised, despite the makers’ claims to its innocence.
Even the pro-life message contained in the course has problems. A testimony is included by a young single woman who continued college during her unplanned pregnancy. Although the pro-life sentiment is good, the organisation mentioned in the story, Feminists for Life, is not Catholic, and not even Christian. Feminists for Life allows for contraception and obviously promotes the ideology of feminism.
Disturbingly, the text is scattered with diagrams designed with rainbow-colours. Once upon a time, this wouldn’t have been a cause for alarm, but these days … when the rainbow movement has infiltrated every corner of our lives with its false tolerance and inclusion? This is definitely suspicious.
One glaring omission in the course is in the discussion of acts which are contrary to the Church’s teaching on marriage. Nowhere is there any mention of the most common violation of the end of marriage: contraception. And strangely, there appears to be only one reference to St John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, even though this seems like an obvious contemporary source of authentic Catholic teaching on sexuality.
All in all, “Christian Love and Sexuality” is a bizarre mix of Mormonism, popular culture and ambiguity, with a dash of Catholicism thrown in.
Praising Islam
Meanwhile, in Melbourne, a class of year 8 Catholics will be studying Islam for 14 weeks this year. The goal of their class is to learn “how the truth in all religions leads people to God”, based on the idea that “every person is a spiritual person.”
The students will be asked to study the Quran, and find passages that “resonate” with them. They’ll then write a response, along with some Arabic, and learn about the differences between the Quran and the Hadith. One wonders if a similar amount of study will be dedicated to Sacred Scripture – the Word of God. There will be a section on Mecca and the Hajj, that is, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, and it’s recommended that someone who has taken part in the Hajj is brought in to speak to the children.
The children will also hear an imam speak and will visit their local mosque, using prayer mats to pray to a false god.
The children will also be asked to create their own ‘religion’, with its own beliefs, ritual and symbols and are given the example of a football club.
Among the teacher’s notes, there is no mention of the fact that Islam originally sprang from Catholicism, or that it is a perversion of Christianity. It is not made clear that the Islamic faith is fundamentally incompatible with Catholicism due to its rejection of the Holy Trinity. As Hilaire Belloc said,
” … But the central point where this new heresy struck home with a mortal blow against Catholic tradition was the full denial of the Incarnation. Mohammed did not merely take the first steps toward that denial, as the Arians and their followers had done; he advanced a clear affirmation, full and complete, against the whole doctrine of an incarnate God. He taught that Our Lord was the greatest of all the prophets, but still only a prophet: a man like other men. He eliminated the Trinity altogether. With that denial of the Incarnation went the whole sacramental structure.”
Yet, despite this, thirteen-year-old children are meant to learn “how all people of faith share a commonality” and how Muslims believe that “the continuity of God’s revelation culminated with the Prophet Muhammad.” This would be confusing enough for the average uncatechised adult Catholic, but for impressionable children to hear this without a clear distinction being made between the two faiths is spiritual homicide.
Nowhere is there any mention of the fact that Islam is the sworn enemy of Christianity, that it has sought to dominate the Christian West since its inception. There appears to be no mention of the Crusades, Lepanto or of any mighty victory won by the Holy Roman Empire against Islam under any of its historic iterations.
Incidentally, the mother who sent this information called her local mosque to see if they teach their children about other faiths. The representative from the mosque said, “NO WAY.”
Perhaps it’s time for Catholic parents to make a coordinated effort to tell their schools that there is ‘no way’ they want their children exposed to gender ideology, feminism or to heresies like Islam and Mormonism.
