The principles of Catholic teaching regarding “sex education”
By Voice of the Family | 1 October 2025
When Catholic parents send their children to schools established by their bishops, they have a right to expect that the instruction they will receive there is in accordance with the faith of the Church. This applies both to the content of the teaching and to the subjects studied. Not only does the Church uphold a great body of doctrine, passed down from the apostles and against which any opposing claims “have not the force of demonstration but are arguments either merely probable or sophistical”,1 but the Church also possesses a clear teaching on which topics are properly studied in schools and which are reserved to the undelegated instruction of the parents. Sad to say, this teaching has not guided the materials now in circulation in Catholic primary and secondary schools in western countries, due in no small part to the pressure of the civil authorities.
It is obviously necessary that, at an appropriate moment in the physical and psychological development of a young person, he or she is informed of the realities of human reproduction and the moral obligations these entail. Responsibility for this lies with the child’s parents. This responsibility is given to the parents directly by God, nor can it be taken from them by the state or even the ecclesiastical hierarchy (the bishops).
Parents are the primary educators of their children but that does not mean that in general they are required to undertake all aspects of that education themselves. It is their responsibility to see to it that their children are prepared for adulthood and the duties that will be theirs when they leave the family home and strike out on their own. On a whole range of matters, it is for the parents to judge which elements of this education can be best given by the parents themselves or (in whole or in part) by other persons chosen and authorised to do so by the parents. Whenever a teacher performs this task, he does so in virtue of the authority delegated to him by the child’s parents and only to the extent and for the ends to which they delegated it.
Some areas of instruction are conventionally and reasonably given by others. The ecclesiastical hierarchy has its own proper right and duty to teach all the baptised concerning the mysteries of divine revelation and those naturally knowable truths (including the natural moral law) which are logically or historically connected with divine revelation. “Through the grace of the sacrament of marriage, parents [also] receive the responsibility and privilege of evangelizing their children.”2 When it comes, however, to naturally knowable truths which are not logically or historically connected with divine revelation, the right to educate is held by the parents as their own and is not possessed by any authority external to the family except by free delegation from the parents. Clearly, advanced linguistic, mathematical or scientific knowledge that the parents do not possess requires expertise for which they would naturally look to a teacher. Other areas are obviously proper to the parents. The parents must educate their children in the virtues, in “tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service”.3 The state, for its part, has a very limited right to insist that the education provided by the parents or their delegates equips children to execute their properly civic duties as electors or in discharging military service.4
The Church teaches that “speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born” and that ideologically motivated politicians “act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home” whenever they begin “setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision”.5 The family is much better placed than the state to prepare children for life in wider society and, if a judgment is required that the state or the family has failed in their duties, the family by precedence sits in judgment on the state and not the other way around. As the Catechism observes, “The home is the natural environment for initiating a human being into solidarity and communal responsibilities. Parents should teach children to avoid the compromising and degrading influences which threaten human societies”.6 Today, very many governments are not only in the hands but are the principal instrument of these “compromising and degrading influences”. The family, in contrast, as Leo XIII teaches, is “a society very small, one must admit, but none the less a true society, and one older than any State. Consequently, it has rights and duties peculiar to itself which are quite independent of the State”.7
Thus, not only moral formation but practical matters such as the acquisition of one’s native tongue, habits of personal cleanliness, learning to dress oneself, table manners etc. are quite obviously not to be delegated to others. If these are not passed on by the parents, or if the parents are unable to pass them on, then there is something seriously wrong. Only, therefore, for the gravest of reasons should parents delegate their duty of informing their children in these most basic areas to another and never under any circumstances should they accept that anyone else has the right to appropriate this duty.
Instruction in the realities of human reproduction and the moral obligations these entail is one of these basic areas. The question of when and how to approach these areas is a matter of the greatest delicacy which requires an intimate familiarity with the physical and psychological development of each young person individually. Not only does an institution outside the home lack this familiarity, not only is it very likely to be tainted with the “compromising and degrading influences” exemplified by our era, but it will never be the case that a judgment about the physical and psychological development of one child will chance to coincide with the same judgment about a class of twenty or thirty other children such that the same moment and the same means will be suitable for all.
Leo XIII warns parents that promoters of modern education all too often desire above all to “break away from Christian discipline [and] are working to corrupt family life”:
“[Parents] hold from nature the right of training the children to whom they have given birth, with the obligation super-added of shaping and directing the education of their little ones to the end for which God vouchsafed the privilege of transmitting the gift of life. It is, then, incumbent on parents to strain every nerve to ward off such an outrage, and to strive manfully to have and to hold exclusive authority to direct the education of their offspring, as is fitting, in a Christian manner, and first and foremost to keep them away from schools where there is risk of their drinking in the poison of impiety.”8
The problem is that today many of the schools where there is an overwhelming “risk of their drinking in the poison of impiety” bear on their face the name “Catholic”. As we have seen the ecclesiastical hierarchy have the right and the duty to instruct children in regard to the sixth and ninth commandments: “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife”. If this is all that is meant by “sex education” (“an ugly term” as Pius XI observes) then all well and good. Undoubtedly, education in questions regarding human reproduction is a prerequisite for a full and adequate treatment of these areas, but that does not licence Catholic schools to usurp the responsibility of parents to provide this education. They may, at most, presuppose a basic understanding of human reproduction by a certain age, with due advance warning to the parents. If, as is far more often than not the case, “sex education” is a label not for instruction regarding the sixth and ninth commandments but for the usurpation from the parents of their duty to educate a child in questions regarding human reproduction, then it is to be resisted with might and main.
Not only are such programmes inappropriate as such because of their insensitivity to differences in regard to the physical and psychological development of each child (and often regarding the even more basic distinction of sex between the children), not only is their very existence an affront to the rights and duties of parents, but they are also almost universally infected with the general “poison of impiety”: mostly particularly in the form of naturalism, which takes no account of original sin or necessity of divine grace and relies on natural means alone to overcome the spiritual enemies of the soul: the world, the flesh and the devil. The Catholic Church teaches that human nature, though good in itself, carries four wounds as a result of original sin: ignorance, malice, weakness and concupiscence. Mere education, the presentation of physical facts or even of a moral ideal, cannot circumvent the terrible fact that fallen man is predisposed to seek infinite satisfaction from finite goods, that the greater the natural good and the stronger the physiological impulse to pursue it, the greater the likelihood that human beings, including children and especially adolescents, will abuse it to their own ruin and that of their companions.
As Pius XI explains:
“Far too common is the error of those who with dangerous assurance and under an ugly term propagate a so-called sex-education, falsely imagining they can forearm youths against the dangers of sensuality by means purely natural, such as a foolhardy initiation and precautionary instruction for all indiscriminately, even in public; and, worse still, by exposing them at an early age to the occasions, in order to accustom them, so it is argued, and as it were to harden them against such dangers. Such persons grievously err in refusing to recognize the inborn weakness of human nature, and the law of which the Apostle speaks, fighting against the law of the mind; and also in ignoring the experience of facts, from which it is clear that, particularly in young people, evil practices are the effect not so much of ignorance of intellect as of weakness of a will exposed to dangerous occasions, and unsupported by the means of grace. In this extremely delicate matter, if, all things considered, some private instruction is found necessary and opportune, from those who hold from God the commission to teach and who have the grace of state, every precaution must be taken. …
“‘Such is our misery and inclination to sin, that often in the very things considered to be remedies against sin, we find occasions for and inducements to sin itself. Hence it is of the highest importance that a good father, while discussing with his son a matter so delicate, should be well on his guard and not descend to details, nor refer to the various ways in which this infernal hydra destroys with its poison so large a portion of the world; otherwise it may happen that instead of extinguishing this fire, he unwittingly stirs or kindles it in the simple and tender heart of the child. Speaking generally, during the period of childhood it suffices to employ those remedies which produce the double effect of opening the door to the virtue of purity and closing the door upon vice.’9
Notes
- St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, I.7. ↩︎
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2225-2226. ↩︎
- Ibid, 2223. ↩︎
- Cf. Pius XI, Divini Ilius Magistri, 49. ↩︎
- Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 14. ↩︎
- CCC, 2224. ↩︎
- Rerum Novarum, 12. ↩︎
- Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christinae, 42. ↩︎
- Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, 65–67, citing Silvio Antoniano, On the Christian education of children (“The Golden Treatise”). ↩︎