Recently, Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco presented teachers at the archdiocese’s four high schools with a statement that says Catholic school employees are expected to conduct their public lives in a way that doesn’t undermine or deny the church’s doctrine. The statement outlines the church’s teaching that using contraception is a sin and that sex outside of marriage, whether it is in the form of adultery, masturbation, pornography or gay sex, is “gravely evil.” As a toxic byproduct of the huggable Jesus era that made-up the sordid history of the 1970s and 80s form of American Catholic education, a time and a group of “Catholic” thinker and educators who overall sought to make Christ more of a man than a God; it all went berserk when, in a good-intentioned, but misguided effort to re-create God into an approachable and lovable being, stripped of meaning and devoid of judgments or punishments, they created Frankensteinian generations of Catholic boys and girls who found it had all become sorely irrelevant. Rudderless, most of us left the Church we never even knew – drifted into relativism, the New Age, cohabitation, and homosexuality. As for myself, after 12 years of parochial education – I had never cracked open a Bible, yet I knew the lyrics to several Simon and Garfunkel songs, taught to us by a smiling, but otherwise uninspiring recently un-habited sister/teacher. In high school, early on – I got an intense crash course into Liberation Theology and then opted-out of “religion” courses in favor of some public service projects.
In my case, it wasn’t so much about a perversion of Catholic doctrine, but a tyrannical reign of mind-bending through silence. Nothing was said. Issues of morality, most implicitly sex – which is always at the forefront of every thought in a pubescent boy, were never even mentioned. What did the Bible say; what had Jesus taught; and what about the Church? Why did it matter; and why should we listen? With all of these questions unaddressed and unanswered – the mind is left to make sense of everything on its own. As a child, we instinctively turn to what’s most familiar – with regards to those with same-sex attraction, we look towards the comforting and affirming figures in pop-culture; then, in the 70s – the pool was limited to The Village People, some soap-opera characters, and, then, in the 80s – the all-encompassing and liberating force of Madonna; now, with the proliferation of gay culture – the possibilities are near endless. At that point, a new god, and a new doctrine enter the lives of the uneducated and the ill-formed. For, it’s much easier to go with the deities that accept and support your every feeling, rather than the true God who Loves you enough to tell the Truth. And, in that sense, many Catholic schools, by choosing not to reveal the fullness of God’s plans for everyone, have especially primed some to not only disregard Christianity, but to embrace an ideology and a lifestyle that very well may kill them.
A form of education that ignores or marginalizes the moral and religious dimension of the person is a hindrance to full education, because “children and young people have a right to be motivated to appraise moral values with a right conscience, to embrace them with a personal adherence, together with a deeper knowledge and love of God.” That is why the Second Vatican Council asked and recommended “all those who hold a position of public authority or who are in charge of education to see to it that youth is never deprived of this sacred right.” ~ Vatican Letter on Catholic Education, “Religious Education in Schools Fits Into the Evangelizing Mission of the Church” (2009)