Catechetical Nightmare

by Dr. Malcolm Brennan

AS MOST READERS of The Angelus are aware—many painfully so—the catechism establishment has plunged about as low as any other section of the Church since the "wonderful renewal" that followed Vatican II. The sound religious instruction of years gone by has succumbed to not one but two corrupting influences. The first, of course, is Modernism, which spoils everything it looks on, and its looks go everywhere. The second whammy to hit catechetical instruction is what may be called educationism, that amorphous bundle of tawdry theories and superficial insights which has brought American elementary and secondary education to its knees.

Catholic education, flat on its back from these two knock-out punches, has chosen these befuddled times for undertaking the delicate business of sex education. Fortunately, Rome has taken an interest in this business and has issued some generally sound guidance for those engaged in this enterprise. Predictably, they do not heed the advice, but it has at least the salutary effect of consoling parents who have complained about the stuff imposed on their children. Now they know their complaints were not groundless, and that fidelity to the Faith sometimes requires a Catholic to defy his pastors and bishops.

Instead of attempting a general survey of what is wrong with Catholic sex education, I would like in this article to examine just one of the text books used in some Catholic schools. This, I think, will provide a good illustration of how sick the enterprise is, without the need for broad and abstract generalizations.

The book is Sexuality and Dating: A Christian Perspective, written for junior high school students by Richard Reichert, published by St. Mary's Press of Winona, Minnesota, and carrying the imprimatur of the Bishop of Winona, Loras J. Watters.

The basic trouble with Sexuality and Dating is that it is thoroughly naturalistic. When modern sex education was invented in the 1920's and 1930's, Pope Pius XI denounced it for being un-Catholic and inhuman on the ground that it was naturalistic. The champions of this bright new idea thought of sex education as just passing out biological information about human reproduction, and they entertained the naive expectation that anyone equipped with the facts would then behave sensibly, freeing the world of unwanted babies and venereal disease. (This is still a large part of the program of Planned Parenthood.) Sexuality and Dating prides itself on not teaching biology only (in fact, it teaches almost none at all). But it is naturalistic nevertheless because in place of biology it teaches psychology.

This psychological orientation is stated quite explicitly in many places where the objective of the course is explained as helping students become "integrated, happy, self-respecting men and women," and "becoming a fully integrated person," and "becoming a whole person in both the psychological and sexual sense of the phrase." (Don't ask me to explain what the "sexual sense" of "a whole person" is!)

For those of you who have not kept up with your pop psychology, sex is a problem because it causes stress (like hurt feelings, guilt, unwanted babies, and venereal disease). In order to avoid all these misfortunes, one needs to get it all together, that is, to take all one's hopes and fears about sex and integrate them into psychologically compatible attitudes that will not cause stress. For example, if extra-marital sex causes someone to have feelings of guilt, then he should adopt a new attitude (like, "extra-marital sex is wrong only when it hurts a third party"), and voila! the guilt is gone, or at least confined to a few manageable cases.

Our book does not go quite so far as my example, but it does devote itself primarily to promoting attitudes that promote psychological health. Now, I am no enemy of mental health, but this book pretends to be teaching the Faith; instead of answering the question, "What must I do to be saved?" it answers a different question, "What must I do to feel good about myself?"

If we enquire further and ask what are the attitudes which promote mental health, we soon discover that we have asked a stupid question. For it is not the contents of an attitude that makes it right or wrong, according to the modem way of looking at things, but only the sincerity with which it is held. Whether, for example, you approve or disapprove of, say, vasectomy, is a matter of little consequence; but whichever attitude you adopt, it should be a matter of deep personal conviction. Immorality in such things is to endorse stereotypes, to accept on faith the attitudes of older generations, or of contemporaries, or, for that matter, of anybody. The authentic person, the one who has a fully integrated personality, trusts no one; he evaluates and adjudicates all things by his own supreme, personal authority.

Although this practice is practically the definition of the worst of sins, pride, it is a constant theme of the whole textbook, and students are shamelessly flattered into believing that their every opinion, no matter how dopey, deserves the respect ordinarily reserved to the deepest thinkers. This ploy was invented by the secular educational establishment which, accepting the premises of a pluralistic society, has to treat all opinions equally. Why Catholic educators should adopt the same technique is hard to understand unless, of course, they have adopted the same "ecumenical" premises.

For all this pretense of respect for every teenie-bopper's opinion, the author does indeed present sets of approved and of disapproved opinions, and a few of these happen to coincide with Church teaching, more or less: marriage is a good thing, pre-marital sex entails troublesome consequences, frequent and habitual masturbation is a sign of a psychosis, easy annulments solve marital difficulties, Jesus championed all but the very few excesses of ardent feminism, it is (barely) possible to disapprove of the ordination of women, homosexuals are unfairly stereotyped and can teach us much about sexuality, abortion is bad, and there is much to be said for (and little against) sexually active singles using contraceptives. (Don't you just admire the intellectual virtuosity with which the author bludgeons Church teaching to a pulp without admitting his heresies? He is a clever one!)

The author faces a dilemma. On the one hand all sincerely held opinions are equally valid, but on the other hand the above opinions are more equal than others. But a dilemma is only a problem on the intellectual level, where two good ideas seem to exclude each other; on the psychological level, however, feelings which are at odds with one another are a sign that you are a sensitive, caring, open-minded person, or at worst a sign that you are not yet psychologically integrated (which in this case means that you have not yet learned to live with a contradiction). In fact, however, the author does not confront his dilemma head on but reverts to subterfuge. He cajoles and coaxes his students into adopting the "right" opinions, but leaves the impression that they have made up their own minds.

This is not as hard to do as it looks, especially when those to be manipulated are children. It is accomplished mainly by two procedures which work best if mingled together: one is to scramble up the language so that meanings become obscure, and the other is to examine feelings instead of things or truths. According to the first technique, we learn in chapter three that people are not males and females (as Genesis claims) but that each person is an individual with a unique combination of masculine and feminine traits. Our wicked culture (beginning with Genesis presumably, but the blame is laid vaguely on St. Augustine) requires boys to suppress their feminine traits, and girls their masculine. Once we are liberated from these stereotypes, then each person can choose to be almost as masculine or as feminine as he or she individually chooses from day to day. Well, it seems to me that you cannot say much about sex if you can't tell the boys from the girls. Or maybe it goes this way: if you can't tell the difference you are free to say absolutely anything.

Perhaps chapter two illustrates the author's technique a little better. Students are provided with a list of about twenty-five sexual terms and are asked to provide the "street" names for these objects or functions. (Apparently all this happens in a mixed class of 12 to 14 year olds.) Now that the students have been encouraged to shout out in public words they have barely heard in gutters or seen scrawled in public rest rooms, they are invited to notice that with some words they giggle and snigger and blush, but with others they do not. What do they make of that?

Not having the Teacher's Manual, I'm not sure what they are supposed to make of it. But the consequences of such an exercise are not hard to predict: students learn that self-psychoanalysis is the key to sexual morality and that modesty and propriety are tricks played on us by language.

In general, the book uses religious and moral terms in ways that confuse. For example: "So dwelling on sexual fantasy and pornography ... is in principle immoral. Willingly and frequently indulged in, it can be considered sinful." (As an English teacher, I cannot resist marking off for bad writing. The "So" appears to be a comparative but turns out to be a conjunction; the shift from active to passive voice is confusing; and the confusion is compounded by the false parallelism between ""dwelling" and "willingly.") The book provides no distinction between immoral and sinful, nor a definition of either, yet the distinction is the justification for one to enjoy a "moderate" amount of pornography. And where in here could one squeeze in the wisdom of avoiding occasions of sin? And why the evasiveness of "can be considered sinful"? As a matter of fact, the one consistent thing said about sin, in the few places where the topic comes up in the book, is that it is pretty hard to commit one. Instead of worrying about sins, students are advised at one point, they should worry about having scruples. (See? If you do not have scruples, you are not troubled by the mental stress of a guilty conscience.)

The confusion of ideas and the heightening of feelings is also aided by the book's multitude of illustrations that do not illustrate anything. They are without captions, are never alluded to in the texts, and they are either pointless (like the photograph of a pair of sneakers) or disconcerting (like the 10-year-old couple with arms draped promiscuously about each other). The theory, I think, is that the pictures make some kind of psychological impact and invite the reader to examine the feelings aroused. I suppose it works where the children have all advanced training in psychoanalytic techniques.

While not prominent, there are traces of another technique for muddying up the truth. You will not find in the book any discussion of principles. In the few places where the word "principle" is used, as in the quotation above, it means little more than the opposite of "fact." Principles are general truths which apply to innumerable individual cases; they are indispensable in any discussion of right conduct. For example, once you embrace the principle of modesty, you are in a position to resolve a million questions about clothing, about slang, about jokes, about movies, about dancing and music, about gestures and looks, etc., etc. For people who have an exaggerated sense of their own personal freedom, principles are disagreeable rules which constrict their free life-styles, and several ways have been invented to get around them (that is, to be unprincipled without psychological stress). One way is to substitute goals and ideals for principles. If you embrace the principle of chastity, you must be chaste right now and in everything; however, if you set chastity as your goal, you can be a bit salacious right now without abandoning the chaste ideal. In other words, you can be chaste and unchaste all at once. Sexuality and Dating does not employ this technique very prominently; I mention it because Modernists frequently do.

Our author does employ the other technique for disposing of principles, which is to call them stereotypes. He does this in the case of homosexuals, among others. First he refuses to talk about homosexuality or the principle of sexual love between members of the same sex. Instead he talks about the individual homosexual or about homosexuals as a group of individuals. Then he makes a parody of what a homosexual is (tough women and sissy men) and waxes indignant at the caricature he has just made, and at us for slapping labels on God's unique creatures. Then he proceeds to confuse the distinction between the subjective guilt of individual persons and the objective wrong of certain acts. Lastly we need something religious-sounding or biblical to confirm us in a "positive" attitude toward persons labeled homosexual, and so we are assured that Jesus Himself was probably taken for a homosexual because of His gentleness and His frequent association with women.

The use to which psychology is put in this book is part of an old ploy used in attacking the Faith. If you do not like the particular truths which God has entrusted to His Church, you can go after them the hard way, contesting each truth one after another, or you can take the easy way, attacking truth itself and thus destroying all possibility of dogma in one fell swoop. It seems to me that this book does just that by changing the question from "What is the truth about sex?" to "How do you feel about sex?" This means that the author is not only engaged in mutilating certain particular Church teachings about matrimony, contraception, occasions of sin, modesty, and the like, but he is also, whether he knows it or not, engaged in trying to demolish revelation, the teaching authority of the Church, and indeed human intelligence itself.

His attempt has no respectability when considered by mature believers, but it is easy to imagine (and many of us do not have to imagine, having seen with our eyes) the devastation which this kind of catechizing has on the young, on innocents who are caught up in the heady onset of puberty and whose foundation in the faith has been laid by those who would put books like this one into their hands.

What shall we say of this book and its author, of Bishop Watters whose imprimatur it bears, of the Catholic school officials who adopt it, of teachers who use it, of parents who condone it? Let us not trust our own words but turn to those of Our Lord: "But he that shall scandalize one of the little ones that believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea."