By LOUISE KIRK
The Romanian doctor has hit the headlines as her statement to the Family Synod gets re-circulated on pro-life blogs. “This is the best presentation at the Synod on the Family!” Dr. Robert Moynihan of Inside the Vatican proclaims of Dr. Anca-Maria Cernea in his latest letter. Dr. Cernea’s intervention has also been picked up by LifeSiteNews.
At about the time that Dr. Cernea, head of the Romanian Association of Catholic Doctors, was explaining to the Synod Fathers how her father had been imprisoned by the Communists for 17 years and how her mother had waited for him not even knowing if he was alive, another initiative was going on back at home in Romania.
The Fight Against Sex Education
For some time now the secular authorities in Romania, as in so many other countries, have been pushing to have explicit sex education made compulsory in the schools. Those fighting against it do so with little money, and less prestige, but enormous commitment. Prominent amongst them is the gallant Association of Students for Life.
It is they, young people fighting against well-heeled organizations, who are the lead signatories in a letter of protest sent on October 14 to the Romanian minister for education and the Romanian minister for health. Under their leadership they have gathered the support of over 80 Romanian NGOs to fight against an appeal by 67 NGOs for a type of sex education which is sadly becoming familiar all over the world.
A Spiritual Battle
In her synod intervention, Dr. Cernea spoke as a doctor when she told the synod fathers that we are fighting a spiritual battle. It is not material poverty or consumerism that are the primary causes of the family crisis, she says, but an ideology which came out of Marxism and has now become a pervasive Gnosticism in which man is trying to redefine himself.
Nowhere is this more dangerous than when it is applied to the young. This is what the Students for Life and their allies explain, taking up and enlarging on Dr. Cernea’s statement.
Every ideology has attempted to take over the minds of the next generation and the idea of using sex education as a tool goes right back to the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. Hungary was the first country to introduce a nationwide program of anti-family education. Through it, children were taught to reject moral principles and despise any form of parental authority.
Their letter goes on explain to the education minister and the health minister how sex education has been shown to fail even in its own objectives of reducing teenage pregnancies and disease. Instead, it has contributed to the general hyper-sexualization of the young, so that now even pornography is being introduced into sex education programs.
“The answer to hyper-sexualization is even more sexualization,” using the logic that the Communists adopted when bringing in more of the same to cover up their failures.
International Battle
The fight against sex education is not confined to Romania, but is being waged in similar terms in many countries of the world. Most of the resistance comes from small organizations set up by individual mothers and fathers who are troubled by what is being inflicted upon their children. They need the strength of the Church behind them, and even non-Catholics are looking to the synod to give them a lead.
There is a strong and repeated message coming from the synod fathers that they are consciously listening to the cries of the people, that they want to be in touch with the reality of people’s lives, that this is a pastoral synod where new doors are to be opened and new possibilities explored.
Is it too much to hope that the synod may become a turning ground from which new energy will be released to help parents and stop well-funded international organizations pushing their corrupting wares on the young?
In an October 20 briefing to the press, both Wilfrid Cardinal Napier of South Africa and Lluis Cardinal Martinez of Barcelona made much of the need to prepare the young for marriage. They suggested that this preparation should begin early, perhaps even in the teenage years.
Maybe they could bring these ideas back further still and consider how as a Church we can get rid of harmful sex education and, in its place, bring in programs which cooperate with parents to help prepare children for vocation and a full life.
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