A sex education guide from the Vatican seeks to avoid approaches that teach either too much about human sexuality to impressionable youth or too little.
The move by the Pontifical Council for the Family came amid the frenzy of World Youth Day, which gathered millions of young people in Krakow, Poland at the end of July.
Headed by Italian Archbishop Vicenzo Paglia, the Council launched a website with materials both for students and educators called “The Meeting Point, project for affective and sexual formation.”
“Cultural, legislative and educational projects directly or indirectly challenge the Christian vision of the body, of the difference and the complementarity between man and woman, the exercise of sexuality, marriage and the family,” Paglia wrote in the project’s introduction.
These projects, he wrote, want to legitimize the different ways in which sexuality is lived in society.
This will be achieved “by proposing visions that constitute a real anthropological change, which impedes the affirmation of sexual identity, virtues, values and attitudes that integrate the body and the affections in the vocation to love that is the basis of the whole project of human life and of the good life according to the Gospel.”
As of Sept.1, Paglia’s office will be absorbed by a new, larger Vatican department, the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, headed by American Bishop Kevin Farrell.
Paglia was recently appointed by Pope Francis as head of the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family.
Divided into six units, the project is a response to Francis’ document on the family, Amoris Laetitia.
In one of its passages, the pontiff writes: “It is not easy to approach the issue of sex education in an age when sexuality tends to be trivialized and impoverished.
“It can only be seen within the broader framework of an education for love, for mutual self-giving.”
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