Why Catholic parents must mobilise in defence of
PRIMARY EDUCATORS b y J O H N S M E ATO N
Welcome address to the inaugural pilgrimage of the Coalition in Defence of Primary Educators in Walsingham on 7 December 2019.
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he purpose of our pilgrimage to Walsingham is to ask Our Lady to pray that God will transform the Catholic bishops of England and Wales so that they lead the Catholic faithful in resistance to the British Government’s wicked legislation which makes Relationships Education compulsory at primary school and Relationships and Sex Education compulsory at secondary school, including compulsory LGBT relationships at secondary level. This is the purpose of our initiative - but I think it’s important to put this purpose into global ecclesiastical context. Sadly, the bishops of England and Wales have repeatedly welcomed this legislation as Dr. Tom Rogers outlined in his analysis “How Catholic church officials have betrayed parents and children” (published in Calx Mariae, Spring 2019). However, the scandalous reality is that the bishops’ policy is very much in line with papal and Vatican policy, and it’s partly in line with the policy of bishops worldwide as reflected by the 2015 Family Synod. In the interim report (relatio post discepatationem) of the Extraordinary Synod of 2014 and the preparatory document (instrumentum laboris) of the Ordinary Synod in 2015 there were passages that suggested that homosexual unions, while not equal to marriage, nonetheless have some degree of legitimacy. The synod fathers, bishops from around the world, rejected this
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approach: no such passages are found in the final reports of either synod. The rejected approach however was reintroduced in Amoris laetitia, “The Joy of Love”, Pope Francis’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation, which states, in paragraph 52, that: “We need to acknowledge the great variety of family situations that can offer a certain stability, but de facto or same-sex unions, may not simply be equated with marriage.” This implies: • that “same-sex unions” are one of the “great variety of family situations”, • that “same-sex unions” offer a “certain stability”, • that “same-sex unions” can be “equated” with marriage on some level, if not “simply”. Furthermore the paragraph states that “only the exclusive and indissoluble union between a man and a woman has a plenary role to play in society as a stable commitment that bears fruit in new life”. To state that only marriage has a “plenary role” necessarily means that other forms of union do have some role to play in society. In a lecture entitled “1517, 1717, 1917: Three Revolutions and Fatima”, delivered in Washington in CAL X M A R IA E
