Catholic Sex Education — Telling a Better Story in the 21st Century

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Jonathan Doyle

Ladies and gentleman, a very good afternoon and a genuine thanks to Dr. Tonti-Filippini for the invitation to be with you today.  I look forward to traumatizing you — I mean sharing with you the latest news from the front lines of Catholic sexuality formation in our school system, where the words of John Paul II that "we are engaged in the front-lines of a lively battle for the dignity of man" have rarely rung more true.

Many children grow up wanting to be doctors or lawyers — not Catholic bioethicists.  So how did I end up spending the last decade talking to hundreds of thousands of people around the world about the light and airy topics of sexuality formation and pornography addiction?  How did I end up building a business where at least 80% of Catholic and Independent schools in this country use our curriculum programs and thousands of teachers each year receive our formation on Catholic identity and mission or on the pastoral care of young people?

Some years ago, Karen and I were newly married and were working in a Catholic boarding school in a remote part of Australia.  I was teaching, and Karen, with a nursing background, was running the school clinic.  One Monday morning a girl from Year 11 came to see her.  Long story short, she had gone to a party on the previous Friday night and her boyfriend of 3 weeks thought it would be a good time for her to have sex for the first time.

They had both drunk a lot.  People were hiding by the windows trying to video them with camera phones and others kept trying to walk in the door.  The young woman was traumatized and pushed him away.  As she ran out of the house crowds of people laughed at her.

In the silence of the school clinic she broke down.  During a long conversation that followed Karen asked her.  "Did you want to have sex with him?" Through her tears she whispered, "No!"  A pause.  "So how did you end up in that situation?" She looked up at Karen and said, "We'd been going out for three weeks, he'd been so nice to me.  I felt I had to give him something."  Sometime later, I famously said, "Buy him a tie!"

On that day I got interested in one single question.  How could a young person go through our school system and have no idea of the truth and meaning of human sexuality and what that might look like in the concrete realities of life?

The very first line of Aristotle's ethics says, "All human action is action toward the good."  We could probably qualify that by saying, "It's action toward the perceived good."  What I realized that day is that our young people face a metaphysical crisis of the true, the good and the beautiful.  This precious young woman wanted love, intimacy, to be beautiful.  She experienced something very different.

That day was a catalyst for us to make some small difference in the lives of young people and the families and educators that speak into their lives.

So, as a result of life experience and the extraordinary quality of the post-graduate formation afforded me here at the Institute, my wife Karen and I, and the staff that have followed in our footsteps, have had a unique and privileged opportunity to share deeply in the hopes and aspirations of young people, to view the quiet heroism of a small number of faithful and committed Catholic teachers, and to marvel at the vast indifference and cynicism of numerous Catholic leaders and technocrats.

I think, on that last point, it's worth following the advice given by Archbishop Chaput to Catholic leaders: that we need to call things by their right names.  We need to call cowardice cowardice, sophistry sophistry, and indolence indolence, and remind ourselves that the Church does not have a mission — she is a mission.  And when vast numbers of our young people leave our schools with no understanding of the truth and meaning of human sexuality, then some of our Catholic bureaucracies and school leaders need to answer some tough questions.  Or perhaps it might be of enough of a start to realize that some questions about the efficacy and reason for existence of our schools even exist.

My invitation today is to very briefly focus on some of the key issues facing young men in our school systems in the area of sexuality formation.  Perhaps next year, assuming my thinly veiled frustration with aspects of our system does not become too much of a stench in the collective nose of Pharaoh, I can return and share with you what we are seeing happen for young women.

In terms of young men, I will talk very briefly about how pornography is the key game changer in the current sexual landscape of modernity, and then finish with an insight I developed from recently reading Anthony Esolen's somewhat turgid but interestingly named Ten Ways To Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.

I'll then finish quickly by highlighting what just might actually work with young men in our schools, and mention some of the places and some of the fine men and women who are devoting themselves to that noble cause.

Boys need men.  It's over a decade since David Blankenhorn wrote Fatherless America, and in terms of a curse upon the land, when the hearts of the fathers are not turned to the children, the sociological evidence for the absence of men and fathers in boys lives is voluminous.  To be succinct, men and fathers need to provide sexual discipleship.  Where exactly do we all think young men learn about human sexuality in the absence of men and fathers?

Where might they learn about gentleness, courtesy, perseverance when relationships are tough, romance, and sexual union?  In the absence of men and fathers engaging with them and modelling and mentoring a truly human and divine model of sexuality they learn from peers and the Internet.

We are a deeply conflicted society.  Men are useful as the butt of sitcom jokes.  They are Homer Simpson types.  They are still useful enough in the odd war but outside of that we don't know quite what to make of them.  Any celebration of an innate and fixed masculine essence would undo the faux gains of the sexual revolution.  Any suggestion that there is nobility, strength and dignity in the masculine soul, anything distinctive, would be to subvert the cultural carpet bombing that is the push for androgyny.

And let's be clear — androgyny is nothing other than the denial of the unity in difference that defines the trinity.  And if that sounds abstract, let's remind ourselves that John Paul II said that the Trinitarian concept of the image of God (in man) is perhaps the deepest theological statement that can be made about the human person.

All this is just to say that many, in fact a vast multitude, of our boys are lost and alone when it comes to great questions of their hearts, the meaning of their bodies, and what to do with the visceral and transformative strength that lies within them.

In the absence of men and fathers engaging with them and modelling and mentoring a truly human and divine model of sexuality, they learn from peers and the Internet.

It's interesting that the term husband comes from the old English and Nordic husbonda, which translates as he who dwells in the house.  The one who is present.  The one whose heart has been turned to the children.

In 1910 the divorce rate was 9%.  It's currently around 48%, but the best research from the US suggests that divorce is not something we need to worry about much anymore, since the coming generation won't bother marrying at all, with the exception of the wealthy and educated classes, who understand that stable, committed marriage confers numerous benefits.

Thus many of our boys, when it comes to sexuality formation and manhood and love and romance, don't have a clue — because there is no one in the home to teach them.

It's interesting that the term husband comes from the old English and Nordic husbonda, which translates as he who dwells in the house.  The one who is present.  The one whose heart has been turned to the children.  And this absence of teachers is more than likely to ensure that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons and that masculine dysfunction will continue from generation to generation.  These are the boys in our schools.

Pornography.  In the absence of men and fathers boys learn their sexual scripts from pornography.  Some years ago I was lucky to share the stage at a conference in Federal Parliament with Professor Mary Anne Layden from the University of Pennsylvania.  One of her key points was to hammer home the reality that pornography is a curriculum.  It operates as a pedagogy that normalizes brutality, enshrines a hyper aggressive Freudian utilitarianism, and strips sexual intimacy of the transcendent and sublime.

Some months ago I was listening to a podcast by a Catholic priest in the US.  He made the interesting observation that science often, perhaps always, ends up proving the Church right.  Our cultural scripts begin with the Church portrayed as a retrograde enemy of all progress, but it is funny how the sociological and epidemiological evidence often ends up supporting the Church on key issues.  How is this relevant to pornography?

To make a long story short, the Catholic Church thinks pornography is a bad thing.  What is the emerging science telling us?  Pornography creates neurochemical arousal in the brain that is way beyond any evolutionary model.  Boys and men can be sexual aroused for hours at a time because pornography overrides the brain's satiety mechanism because of endless novelty.  The result is that the brain is dosed in large amounts of dopamine.  Too much dopamine leads to the secretion of another neurochemical called Delta FosB.  Delta FosB, when overproduced, eats brain matter.

The largest study to date suggests a loss of somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of frontal lobe grey matter for heavy Internet pornography addicts.  The result is a loss of impulse control and an inability to foresee consequences.

So, not to be overly pessimistic (since you will all know a few young men that don't fit this description), we have a generation of unfathered and unmentored boys who can access a perverted sexuality formation modality — online pornography — that has absolutely no historical precedent.  And no one is talking to them about it.

A final quick reflection based on Anthony Esolen's book ties in, in a roundabout way, with the absence of men and fathers.  Esolen's task in his latest book is to simply make the point that much of modern culture flattens human experience into the mass produced and banal.  He argues that what we have done culturally is to kill young people's imagination.  When everyone wants to be Miley Cyrus or Bieber then who's left to do the next Sistine Chapel?  I think I agree.  In terms of sexuality formation, we actually have a generation of young people with a crisis of imagination.

Let me explain.  I can tell you one thing that I know for sure, after all these years and so many lectures, seminars and visits around the world: boys want to be good men.  They want to be heroic.  They want to love and strive and struggle and be strong and come through and serve young women, but many just don't know how to love.  They have a crisis of imagination because they lack a compelling ideal.  They lack a masculine narrative of sacrificial love and service.  They actually don't know that they are made in the masculine generative archetype and that the deepest truth of their existence is that they can only find themselves through a sincere gift of self.  All this potential then turns inward and is twisted by the ugliness and self-hatred cycle of pornography addiction.

But I know a place where they could hear a better story.  I know a place where the truth and meaning of human sexuality is growing from a whisper to a quiet counterculture.  Something similar once happened in Imperial Rome.  People began to hear a more compelling story about life and love and death and marriage and family and birth and children and selflessness.

I never get cynical or hopeless because I know that a better story, a true story, one that connects with the deepest aspirations of the human heart can, eventually, overcome pain and isolation and perversion and lies, in all their many forms.

Our job is win the battle for their imagination by telling a much better story.  And it is not just a story.  It is a story accompanied by the Logos that spun the universe into being.  It is a story accompanied by power, and that power is in the heart of the Church and her sacraments.

There is good news.  There is always good news.  We have to tell a better story about sex, marriage, romance, and manhood.  There is such beauty we can share.  I think of how the word 'chastity' is such a joke for teens.  But the actual definition in the catechism is compelling and beautiful, and if shared with boys by men and women who actually believed it and had lived it, could make such a difference.  Chastity is an apprenticeship in self-mastery where the couple wait to receive each other as a gift from God.

Our young people want to love.  They want to be loved.  They need a better story.

As men, we need to get off our collective backsides and stand up for our sons, grandsons, nephews and students.  We need to talk to them again — about manhood and love and sexuality and service.

As men, we need to get off our collective backsides and stand up for our sons, grandsons, nephews and students.  We need to talk to them again — about manhood and love and sexuality and service.  Our silence is serving no one.  But I think to create a change, we need to genuinely pursue holiness of life, and abandon ourselves to the Church and her sacraments and the Christ who is within them both.  I mean this.  I've seen plenty of big programs, and there is a place for them, but what we actually need right now are some saints.  The Catholic Church is not in the business of programs.  It is in the business of relationship with Jesus and sanctification of souls.

We need some principals who will stand up and make sexuality and character formation a key part of their ministry, and stop trying to lure parents in the door with another iPad offer or the promise of better test scores.  We need men and women in our Catholic Education Offices to realize that they exist to serve the Church — she who is a mission.  They exist to serve young people.  This requires saints at the top of our leadership structures.  It requires saints — men and women who think with the Church.

We desperately need staff professional development as the highest priority.  Less than 8% of our teachers have theological qualifications.  Most are people of good will.  A vocal few seek to deliberately subvert the Church's teaching, undermine parents' rights as primary educators, and sow confusion, skepticism and cynicism among our young people.

When these many educators, these people of good will, are given the time and resources to encounter and consider the Church's teaching on human sexuality, the transformation is profound.  Many become quiet evangelists in their classrooms and often in their own homes, and they come, in time, to understand the depth and beauty and nobility of what it means to be a Catholic educator.

We currently provide online formation in Catholic identity and mission to over 100 schools in this country, and our mission is to reach many, many more in the coming years.

Our young people want to love.  They want to be loved.  They need a better story.  We know the best story in the world.