The Parents' Hour

Parents across the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul are up in arms over the news that of all the “safe environment” curricula available to choose from, our archdiocese has chosen the most controversial and explicit of all for our youngest children, Talking About Touching.

You can read all about Talking About Touching on this blog and on the website, www.primaryeducators.org. You can read that it is an entirely secular program, teaching intimate and distorted sexual concepts without any context of faith. You can view the lesson plans which contain stories of explicit sexual abuse of children. You can see how certain chapters of Planned Parenthood and SIECUS enthusiastically endorse Talking About Touching. You can read the history of Committee for Children, the company behind TAT, although you may think it too unbelievable to be true.

There are many parents who will dismiss this issue with a wave of the hand. “These parents must be hysterical. They must be some fringe element, the type that lives in a vacuum and refuses to expose their children to the real world. They must be the ones disrespectful of the Church, always thinking they know better. After all, the local church keeps referring to parents as the ‘primary educators of our children,’ therefore they must be respecting us, right?”

It is this last point where I take aim. It is with great love for my Church, my bishops and priests that I, as a lay person and mother, must point out the gross mistakes made, both in the actual material selected for my children, but also the way this process has been conducted. While we constantly hear that the role of the parent as primary educator is being respected, I ask, how? When? Where were the parents when our archdiocese put together a committee to study the various programs? Why were no parents invited to participate? Why have thousands of archdiocesan employees had to sit through adult training sessions, but there have been no such sessions for the parents? Why was a session held for archdiocesan employees (of which I am one) detailing the curriculum recommendations, but still no such informational session for the parents? Why are the parents the last to be allowed to view the curriculum being implemented for our children, after church employees and pastors? Are these not our children?


While I have my own answers to the above questions, that is for another day. For today, I urge parents to inform themselves and prayerfully ponder their role as parents and as members of the lay faithful. I truly believe that this is the parents’ hour and that parents have a duty to respectfully speak out against this attack upon the innocence not only of our own children, but of all children of the archdiocese.