In preparation for the next schoolyear: The poster says "Minister, let us re-establish parents' rights to educational priorities. Stop gender [ideology] in schools".
One must take heart from the fact that Family Day rallies in Italy and the anti-'marriage for all' rallies in France continue to
attract great participation at a time when all of Western Europe appears swamped in secularism...Long may they carry on, and
may their tribe increase!
Catholic parents in Rome to protest
'gender ideology' taught in schools
Italy's Constitution gives parents
rights regarding their children's education
Translated from
June 16, 2017
Tomorrow at 10:30 a.m., a ‘flashmob’ is planned before the Ministry of Public Instruction in Rome to get concrete responses from Minister Valeria Fedelli about acknowledging and recognizing the rights of parents and families regarding the education of their children on sensitive matters like sexuality and objective identity.
Fedelli is well known (apart from her questionable educational degree) as a fanatic on ‘anti-discrimination’ programs – which, in this case, means promoting ‘gender ideology’ in the schools, surreptitiously or stridently as necessary, without any indication on the part of the so-called Catholics who are in the majority in the Italian government that they are concerned in any way about an action that also contradicts what Pope Francis has said, officially at least, about gender ideology.
In recent months, cases have mounted showing that gender ideology has infiltrated into Italian schools starting with primary school pupils, thanks to extremely ideologized teachers and school officials who have shown no respect for pupils or their parents. But Fedelli cannot be made totally responsible for this, since her appointment had been heavily criticized from the beginning, and not just for her lack of educational credentials and experience, for claiming false data in her CV, and because she was clearly appointed precisely to promote gender ideology in Italian schools.
Therefore the planned flashmob will make two specific demands:
- Formalizing a normative requirement that schools must obtain an informed consent or preventive request from parents about the content of sex-education lessons; and
- Avoiding any action by education officials that will leapfrog parents in making any decisions affecting the education of their children.
Parents’ rights in this respect are guaranteed by Article 30 of the Italian Constitution, which must be upheld and respected.
Because of this constitutional provision, protesting parents are also asking that
“schools would institute alternative activities for the children of parents who oppose certain educational activities on sensitive topics”, according to Massimo Gandolfini, a neurosurgeon who is the spokesman for Italy’s now-familiar ‘Family Day’ rallies in support of Catholic values,.
Gandolfini says concerned parents are demanding to be “involved and heard by school officials before they formulate new instructional plans”. It is pointed out that
just as it has been possible for parents to refuse religious instruction classes for their children, it should similarly be possible for them to opt out of sex-education classes.
The flashmob organizers say that if Minister Fedelli should fail to respect the legitimate requests made by concerned parents, then they will go on to organize a nationwide protest rally as in past Family Day rallies, “because hundreds of thousands of Italian families refuse to take a step backwards”.
“We ask our people,” Gandolfini says, “to remember the next time they go to the polls to remember those who ignore our requests, those who will seek to instrumentalize us, as well as those who are standing by us in this battle”.
Gandolfini recounts in an online newspaper, In Terris, that since January this year, events have not been any comfort to Italian parents. “A few weeks ago, it was reported that a school principal in Milan had refused a mother’s request to exempt her daughter from a sex-education course organized aby LGBT associations. In Modena, a female teacher distributed to her first-grade pupils a detailed diagram of how the conjugal act is performed…”
Meanwhile, Fedelli’s initial reaction to the planned demonstration was rather ‘singular’: “I cannot understand why they would come here to demonstrate – I think they have the wrong address – as if she was not the Minister of Public Instruction, and the events alluded to did not take place in Italian schools.
Meanwhile, the other Italian ministry that has to do with education (Ministry of Education, Uniersities and Research) has said that it takes a position of "
voluntary evanescence [That's a new one! Does it mean the ministry can simply ignore any requests made to it for formal action? Taking a leaf from Bergoglio, eh?] in the face of formal requests from associations and political parties (including parliamentary inquiries”.
The planned flash mob is organized by ProVita, NonSiToccaLaFamiglia (Do not touch the family!), Articolo 26, and Generazione Famiglia. The organizers have also circulated a memorandum of advice for parents.
Advice to parents who are protagonists
in the network to assert parental rights
over the education of their children
• Network with other parents, contact and get involved with parents’ associations who can provide you with mutual support and guidance. Always try to act with your fellow parents – you will be more effective and make a greater impact that way.
• When enrolling your child(ren), ask for and carefully read the Piano Triennale dell’Offerta Formativa (Triennial Plan of Formative Offering) in which each school describes its curricular, extra-curricular and educational program. Verify periodic changes. The document must be provided to you by the school.
• Also read well the Patto di Corresponsabilità Educativa (Agreement for Educational Co-Responsibility) which the school is obliged to have parents sign. Not all schools may offer this. If there are parts that you do not agree with, you are not obliged to subscribe to everything contained therein.
• In particular, check out the programs for ‘relational’ and sexual education, against discrimination and bullying, and any promotion of ‘gender ideology’ pursued by many teachers with the help of external agencies, as well as all the propositions in Comma 16 of the new law (107/15) called La Buona Scuola (the good school).
• Build alliances with school officials and teachers. Ask them for clarifications, orally or in writing, and discuss with them your educational guidelines in a collaborative way. Aggressiveness will not pay. If necessary, request for more meetings open to parents.
• Make clear that you are in favor of the school to teach against any form of discrimination and sexual parity. As parents, request that the school respect your faculty to decide and your educational responsibility towards your child(ren) on sensitive ethical issues and scientific controversies that have an impact on the child’s education.
• Extra-curricular initiatives must be understood to be optional even if they take place during school hours, and the school must get your informed consent or refusal. According to a Ministry Circular No. 4321, such a written consent or refusal must be given by a parent who is adequately informed, and who has the right to decide whether a child who is still a minor should take part or not. Unfortunately, however, this recommendation is left to the discretion of school officials on the basis of ‘school autonomy’, until the Ministry makes a public statement about Comma 16 in the new law.
• Nonetheless, the parental right over how their children are educated must be recognized with regard to all sensitive educational topics, as provided for in Article 30 of the Italian Constitution and by Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Freedom of education is an incontestable principle.
• Personally deliver your written ‘preventive informed consent, as it is always better to discuss it with a school official. In any case, make sure to be in touch with the parents’ representative in the school board.
• Propose educational initiatives that everyone can share, working positively and constructively.
In sort, let us seriously take in hand our educational responsibility for our children.
For more information, write info@comitatoarticolo26.it or scuola@difendiamoinostrifigli.it
As usual, problems with the Bergoglian 'magisterium' - i.e., the magisterium of the church of Bergoglio, not that of the Catholic Church - are never isolated...
‘Homoheresy’ is in the Church:
Where it comes from, where it is hidden
and how to fight it
by Benedetta Frigerio
Translated from
15-06-2017
Last month, following the annual March for Life in Rome, Matthew McCusker, a member and supervisior at the UK-based Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, spoke at a pro-life international convention to denounce the spread of the homosexualist heresy in the Church, an ideology that not only contradicts Church teaching but also adapts wholesale the dominant mentality in the world that dismisses the idea of divine creation.
McCusker is part of
a new generation of pro-life American youth who reject doctrinal compromise because they are aware that the battle being fought is eschatological and not just political. Among other things, he previously demonstrated the fallacies arrived at in the two Bergoglian family synods to the point that he was praised by Cardinal Raymond Burke for showing that “one does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to have observed all the manipulations attempted”
[to drive the synodal fathers into the predetermined conclusions desired by Pope Francis]. We spoke to McCusker:
You have said that homoerotic thinking has infiltrated the Church. Can you explain that better?
Yes, I refer especially to the use of sex education programs that include contents contradicting the teachings of the Catholic Church. The most recent and shocking example is a document produced by the
Catholic Education Service (CES), an official agency of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW). Entitled “Made in the image of God: A challenge to the homo(sexual)- and bi(sexual)-phobic bullying in Catholic schools”, it consists of 40 pages of lesson plans developed to combat supposed sex-related bullying in Catholic schools.
It enthusiastically endorses the LGBT ideology over Church teaching. For example, it says that children must be taught to use ‘correct LGBT terminology’ in which the definitions are those provided by the LGBT movements.
Such as that “Children in Catholic schools should be taught that the word ‘trans-gender’ is ‘frequently used as a generic term to refer to all persons who do not identify themselves by the sex with which they were born or with a binary sexual system. Some trans-gender persons feel they exist not within either of the two categories of biological sex but somewhere outside being either male or female. “[ Or that ‘allies’ refers to “all non-LGBT persons who support and fight for the rights of LGBT persons”, and that among LGBTs themselves, a ‘lesbian’ is allied to a ‘trans-sexual’, etc. But besides such guidelines, the CES also provides a specific ‘sex-ed’ curriculum.
What‘s that about?
It recommends that children aged 3-7 should be taught that “there are many different family structures, and these must be respected”. These formulations ‘different family structures’ and ‘ various family forms’ are frequently used to promote homosexualism and LGBT adoptions but they are deceptive.
Yet it is the same language found in Amoris laetitia when the pope, writing about ‘same-sex unions’, says “we must recognize the great variety of family situations which can offer rules for living”.
You have denounced the CBCEW. Is that not a circumscribed case?
Unfortunately, they are not the only case. Recently, in Nashville, Tennessee, a Catholic school began a program in which children are shown explicitly sexual images and taught the many different ways of articifial contraception, without ever telling them that using these methods is a sin. When a group of parents complained to the bishop, the latter supported the school, to the point that a boy was expelled when his parents said they would not allow him to take part in these sex-ed lessons. Many bishops fail to support Catholic parents who wish to exercise their right to determine their children’s education.
How is it possible that some cardinals and bishops – who in the past would never have been expected to do so – now openly contradict the teaching of the Church and advocate an anti-Christian and anti-human ideology?
Some prelates, like the Archbishop of Westminster (London), have dissented from Church teaching on human sexuality for years. Cardinal Vincent Nichols – now president of the CBCEW – has a most disquieting record on the entire spectrum of issues that pro-life and pro-family activists have been fighting – sex education, contraception, same-sex unions and communion for adulterers.
Nichols is even weak-willed against abortionists, saying that “the value that we give to human life at its very beginnings (is) clearly… not the same we give to an adult sitting beside us”. He was against authentic sexual ethics even as early as 1996 when he was just an auxiliary bishop, giving his imprimatur to a book according to which in certain circumstances, Catholics could use artificial contraception. Yet he was promoted under both John Paul II and Benedict XVI [who made him Archbishop of Westminster after serving in Birmingham], and now, Pope Francis has given him new responsibilities. This shows that a very serious crisis [one among MANY!] has touched the very heart of the Church. Nichols is only one of so many prelates entrusted with teaching the Catholic faith even as they have openly taken positions contrary to the faith.
Do you think that such heresy has infiltrated into the Church? Why? Do you think the Church has been afflicted for some time? [Such questions! Surely, the interviewer is not naïve!]
The response that most bishops around the world had to Humanae vitae shows that back in 1968, the problem was already very serious. [Well, of course! - it was the first blossoming of the ‘spirit of Vatican II’.] The rejection of Church teaching on artificial contraception has been the root of many other problems. It is a rejection of the fact that the conjugal act is primarily meant to be procreative not just unitive, and the proper place for the act is within marriage which is intended to generate children and to educate them. The second goal of matrimony is the mutual benefit of both spouses. Rejecting the primacy of the procreative goal opens the way not just to contraception but also to homosexual practices which obviously cannot be procreative.
Yet already, during Vatican-II, prominent figures like Cardinal Leo Suenens of Belgium argued against the traditional teaching of the Church on the primary end of matrimony. All of which was reflected in Gaudium et spes which does not spell out the hierarchy of marriage goals, but rather proceeds to give a detailed explanation of the unitive goal (Par 49) before it brings up the procreative goal (Par 50).
But the roots of the crisis obviously go even deeper, to relativism which arose from evolutionary philosophies that deny the existence of a natural moral law that is unchangeable and binding.
But why has the Vatican not corrected all that?
Not only is there no correction, but it has been reinforced. Just consider that the Pontifical Council for the Family, after the publication of Amoris laetitia, unveiled its sex-education program entitled ‘The Meeting Point’. Written for schoolchildren and not for parents, it does not reflect the moral teaching of the Church, takes a secularized and secularizing attitude to expose children and minors to obscene and pornographic images.
Worse, Pope Francis has endorsed the United Nations’ so-called Sustainable Development Goals which calls on all its member states “to assure universal access to services for sexual and reproductive health and to insure universal access to abortion, contraception and sex education”. Yet as late as September 1, 2016, this pope reaffirmed in his message for the Day of Prayer for Environmental Care that he was “grateful that the nations of the world had adopted the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in 2015” [on the very day the pope addressed the UN General Assembly, where he expressed unconditional support of the UN-SDG].
How should we combat such an ideology which already seems to be widely accepted in the Church?
The first answer must be spiritual. In Fatima, Our Lady had warned that ‘the errors of Russia’ would be disseminated in the world and cause the loss of many souls. The children of Fatima reported that that Our Lady said ‘sins of the flesh’ have brought most souls to Hell and spoke about the ways in which such sinners have grievously offended God. But she also gave us the solution: prayer and penitence. She asked specifically for the daily Rosary, for prayers to convert sinners, and reparation for the offenses to her Immaculate Heart, particularly through confession and Communion on the first Saturday of the month. She also asked that the pope consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart.
We must continue to pray and follow her instructions. Meanwhile, we must spread the truth about what is being taught to children in schools, so that parents may know. Because those who plan and carry out these programs try to mask the real contents of their teaching by using seemingly neutral language, such as “age-appropriate comprehensive sexual education”. But just reading what is being taught immediately shows what they really mean.
One example is the World Health Organization which in its ‘Standards for Sex Education in Europe’ considers it ‘appropriate’ to teach children from age 1-4 about ‘precocious masturbation by infants’; to introduce children between 4-6 to “relations between persons of the same sex”; and from a5 years onwards, their ‘right to abortion”.
Because of this, it is all the more concerning that in Chapter 7 of Amoris laetitia, there is a section entitled “Yes to sex education” which ignores all the serious problems arising from almost all available sex education programs. Worst of all, it fails to affirm the Church’s teaching that sex education of children should come from the parents and not from the schools. [This egregious AL Chapter 7 failing is almost always forgotten or overlooked because critics have been fixated on Chapter 8 and its permissiveness of adultery.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/06/2017 05:42]