My Challenge to Cardinal Law

May 4, 1994

In my cover letter, I wrote Cardinal Law, “You are making a big mistake.” I challenged Cardinal Law to read enclosed samples of erotic materials that his “expert committee” thought were ok for our Catholic school children.

Cardinal Bernard Law
2121 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02135

Dear Cardinal Law,

On March 8, 1994, you wrote to me regarding my letter/book that I submitted to you a year ago during Lent 1993. My letter, called Catholic Classroom Sex Education is an Oxymoron, urged you to conform to the Magisterium and ban sex information classes in our Archdiocese.

Your recent letter manifests your confidence in an ad hoc committee (you have not identified the members), which you appointed both to review my letter and the sex education activities of the Archdiocese of Boston. I understand that it was proper for you to seek help in reviewing my letter/book.

After reading their report and your letter, it appears you intend to continue to promulgate sex information programs for our Catholic youth, by following the advice of the Ad Hoc Committee. I do request that you read this letter by yourself, in its entirety. It is not long, and will show you that you are making a big mistake by allowing the Church to teach the kind of material the Ad Hoc Committee favors. (I have also written an analysis of your response to me concerning the Ad Hoc Committee report. I sent a copy to Msgr. Murphy if you wish to read it.)

What is at issue here is the salvation of souls: those of innocent children, misinformed professionals, and more personally, your very own soul.

By your willingness to follow the advice of the Ad Hoc Committee, you continue to teach children, by using the Benziger “Family Life Program,” to re-define the family as a “group of people who live together and love one another.” (Grade 5 Text, p. 6) Cohabitating couples and practicing homosexuals become “family” in the children’s eyes, by your endorsing this program. So much for Holy Matrimony, Cardinal Law; it’s gone. I can barely hold back my tears.

Examine what you teach children in the Franciscan Video Series, In God’s Image:

“Chances are you will not get these diseases if you are not sexually active or have engaged in oral sex, which is genital kissing or climaxing in the mouth (from your Franciscan Video program, In God’s Image).

Is this truly your own idea of formation in virtue? Or, does it belong to the Ad Hoc Committee and program’s author, Patricia Miller, who the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are allowing to speak for them at teacher workshops interpreting theft recent document, Human Sexuality: A Catholic Perspective for Education and Lifelong Learning. (Miller is certified as a sex educator by the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (ASSECT), the largest multidisciplinary sexological organization and the only such certifying arm for Planned Parenthood teachers.

You indicated to me, and to the children under your pastoral care, that it is “Catholic for one of your accepted authors, Kiernan Sawyer, in Choices and Decisions, to teach the following about so called “gender sexuality”:

Q. “What does the Bible say about homosexuality?”

A. The Bible clearly condemns homosexual activity. However, modern biblical scholarship suggests that the condemnation is often directed toward homosexual acts by heterosexual persons… They hold that the contemporary questions concerning loving sexual activity between consenting adults in a committed loving relationship was simply not addressed in the scriptures (Directors Manual, p.83)

Choices and Decisions by Kiernan Sawyer is an excellent sample of values clarification, dissent, and the political agendas of the contraceptors, the abortionists, and the homosexuals. It grieves me that you allow yourself and Christ’s beloved bride to be identified with such a syllabus.

Or maybe it’s best to call to mind the first sample of erotic stimuli which I pointed out to you – as far back as 1988 – a sample from Nancy Hennessy Cooney’s book, Understanding Sex and Sexuality. Nancy, who signed the solidarity ad in the New York Times on March 2, 1986, advocating that abortion could sometimes be a morally valid choice. She instructs children that:

“The Mound of Venus’ contains nerve endings that all add to sexual excitement when rubbed or pressed.”

Children are then required to study the obstetrical view found on page to learn the female reproductive anatomy. One ponders, Cardinal Law, why the anus is included under “reproductive anatomy.” I wonder how is it humanly possible for you to allow this filth and dissent to go on unchecked?

On what grounds do you allow pro-abortion advocates to teach our Catholic children?

Dear Cardinal Law, is it possible that you are so busy that you allowed this committee to do your reading of my letter to you? Isn’t this last sample a perfect sample of what Pope John Paul II condemned in Familiaris Consortio (37) when he told parents:

“The Church is firmly opposed to an often widespread form of imparting sex information dissociated from moral principles. That would merely be an introduction to the experience of pleasure and a stimulus lending to the loss of serenity.. .while still in the years of innocence.. .by opening the way to vice.”

“Sex information without moral principles” deplored by our Pope in no way gives license to a form (or program) of sex information with morality. After children learn in class about “rubbing the Mound of Venus,” wouldn’t you agree that no amount of true morals added to this instruction can restore their lost innocence. Shouldn’t this never, never be taught, at any age?

For sure, the Ad Hoc Committee was right on one thing. I call your programs “sleazy, filthy, a matter of erotic stimuli and an occasion of sin.” How could anyone call the abpvesamples any thing else?

By placing their bets on the chastity cartel of sex educators, who claim their programs are “Catholic,” your Ad Hoc Committee was either unwilling or unable to grasp the simple difference between heretical, clinical, erotic sex information, and the proper formation in moral catechesis. The clinical sample cited above simply makes open, public, and profane what is h nature private. intimate, and sacred; whereas, formation in purity “keeps the sexual secret hidden as a dominion whose disposition lies in the hand of God.” (Dietrich von Hildebrand) Therefore, this formation needs to be part of teaching the entire Faith – and proceeds gradually, delicately, cautiously, and prudently under the principle of parental subsidiarity.

It is impossible to pass the above samples off as “chastity” formation or Catholic moral law, and good parents everywhere know that to try to do so is a charade.

Your Ad Hoc Committee neither refines my claim that you are in contradiction of the constant teaching of the Church on this subject; nor does their report provide any authoritative Catholic teaching to justify your persistence in teaching clinical sex information, values clarification, and anti-Catholic political agendas in the classroom. I have sent you these documents, dating from the Council of Trent through to cunrrent references on formation in Familiaris Consortio. Because you are the servant of God, and shepherd of his people, you know you are not free to sweep these teachings under the rug. Besides, you always indicate a desire to want to do the right thing.

Thus, before Christ, present in the Eucharist, I pray that you will claim your rightful authority and put an end to sex information programs in Catholic schools, and tell parents to exclude their children in public school when such programs cannot be eradicated. Even the Ad Hoc Committee warns you about public school sex education!

Sex education programs are not formation in morality as my samples so easily illustrate. It is your duty before God, to obey the Magisterium. We are talking about the salvation of souls: the children’s, the professionals’, and your very own. Please God, that you obey, because of His love.

I close by begging you on my knees, Cardinal Law, in 1994, to respond to the regulative norms of natural law and constant doctrine set forth in Pope Pius Xl’s Christian Education of Youth in the same manner in which Pope Paul VI exhorted priests to assent to Humanae Vitae in 1968:

Your first task – especially in the case of those who teach moral theology – is to expound the Church’s teaching on Marriage without ambiguity. Be the first to give, in the exercise of your ministry, the example of loyal internal and external obedience to the Magisterium of the Church. As you know well, that obedience obliges not only because of the reasons adduced, but rather because of the light of the Holy Spirit, which is given in a particular way to the Pastors of the Church in order that they may illustrate that truth.

Your concluding sentence of your March 8th letter, however, is hopeful. It reads; “am confident the truth will remain at the core of all our teaching.” I pray, Cardinal Law, that our Lord will attune your ears to His voice. Please note that I have also enclosed and exerpt, below, from Illius Divini Magistri.

In the Risen Christ,

Love,

Mrs. Ann Grayson

Exerpt from – Illius Divini Magistri

December 31, 1929

Another grave danger is that naturalism which nowadays invades the field of education in that most delicate matter of purity of morals. 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 youth 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 mind (Romans 7:23); 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 have the grace of state, every precaution must be taken. Such precautions are well known in traditional Christian education, and are described adequately by Antoniano cited above, when he says:

“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 or 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.”