News Item: : St. Winefride, Fair Flower of Ancient Wales - Pray for us!
(Category: Torch of The Faith News)
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Saturday 26 May 2018 - 11:15:38

The fine statue of St. Winefride in the chapel of her ancient Holy Well in North Wales. As we said last April, during our 15th Wedding Anniversary spent there, this is a favourite place of ours, which has played a key part in our life and vocation as a married couple.

LGBT Education Comes to Wales

LifeSiteNews reported on Thursday that Wales is to ''embed'' LGBT sex-education into all school curriculum, beginning in kindergarten.

This new programme will be officially released by local government in April of next year, becoming normative for even the youngest of infants from 2022. The leftist Guardian newspaper has suggested that this could make Wales a ''global leader'' in sex-education.

Part of a Bigger Picture

With this development, we can again see just how much Archbishop Malcolm McMahon and the ''Catholic'' Education Service (CES) thrust onto parents a serious problem which just keeps on ''giving'' when, at the beginning of Lent last year, they merrily presented parents with a fait accompli, by announcing their official acceptance of the government's plan for compulsory sex-education for children as young as four years and upwards.

As we said at the time, this was beyond their remit; for it represents a radical breach with the nature and tradition of orthodox Catholic education, wherein: parents are the primary educators of their own children and are thus naturally endowed with key rights and duties to preserve their purity; the age of innocence must not be disturbed under any circumstances; and all educational content must be in accordance with the natural and divine law, as well as in harmony with the developed consciences of the parents.

Anything else, just will not do.

We also noted at the time that, even though Archbishop McMahon suggested that all sex-education content for primary children would be prepared in accordance with Church teaching - surely a contradiction in terms! - the acceptance of compulsory sex-education for primary children would lead to a whole raft of new problems for Catholic parents.

Until then, it had been easier for them to protect their youngest children from inappropriate content, or anything they were unhappy about, because they could simply point out that sex-education was not compulsory in our country for the primary school age range.

However, now that the government has made it so, with the collusion of His Grace, the CES and all of the other Bishops of England and Wales who quietly went along with it all, this protection for parents has obviously gone.

However, the issue also faces them with a second problem.

Again, as we said during Lent last year, the fact that Royal Assent was given to ''same-sex marriage'' laws here in 2013 means that sex-education, as problematic as it has been for many years, will now also include and promote the LGBT dimension.

And now that sex-education for young children is compulsory, it will be very difficult for parents to resist strongly homosexualist materials, such as those being incrementally introduced by local authorities across the UK, from being foisted onto even their youngest children.

For several years, stories had already been breaking in the UK about children and parents suffering great distress when, sometimes even without parental knowledge much less consent, local school authorities had begun to put out LGBT materials as teaching resources in primary schools, such as the above-pictured Daddy's Roommate...

Other examples included books like Hello Sailor, The Sissy Duckling, Josh and Jay Have Three Mums and Mom and Mum are Getting Married.

In our contemporary cultural situation, complaining about the use of such materials could even get parents in trouble with the police, if they were suspected of - or even deemed to have committed - a ''homophobic hate crime''.

Coming to a School Near You

Something along these lines actually happened to a parent at the Sacred Heart ''Catholic'' School in Atherton, in the Archdiocese of Liverpool, when one of the dads there went on social media to complain about pro-LGBT materials, which were being promoted to his primary age child, without him having even been so much as consulted.

The combination of ''same-sex marriage laws'' backed by Royal Assent, the updating of curricula to express that, the making of sex-education compulsory for even the youngest of primary age children and the culture of fear created by parental concerns about speaking out, can all be seen as coming together in a kind of ''perfect storm'' for family life in the UK.

As we said last year, Catholic parents and families, as well as all people of good will who do not want this stuff for their kids, deserved much better than this from the Catholic bishops.

There is a chance that all is not lost, in that Archbishop McMahon's original statement on compulsory sex-education did acknowledge parental right to educate their children according to their consciences, and he did suggest that all materials would be adapted to suit the Catholic ethos; though examples of this seeming contradiction in terms remain to be seen.

However, there are also further problems with those points too.

Parents who try to remove their children from classrooms could face serious difficulties in light of all that has been described above.

Plus, taking children out of lessons like that can also cause them extra anxiety, embarassment and feelings of social exclusion. These can be harmful in themselves to childhood development and maturation.

Then there is the fact that, whilst Archbishop McMahon has suggested materials will be adapted and that parents have input, this was not at all the case in Sacred Heart primary school in his own Archdiocese.

At that school, young children had to: watch a play performed by adults about two princes who ''fall in love'' with each other; receive a lesson about when ''gay'' is an acceptable word; design art materials for the Wigan ''Gay Pride'' march; and write reflections about being ''proud'' of who they are and how they would show support to friends who ''come out as gay''.

And whilst Mr. Julian Marsh, a parent at the school who kicked off animatedly about all of this on social media received a visit from local police investigating a possible ''hate crime'', the school's headteacher, Ms. Morrow, received a ''Rainbow Flag'' award from the LGBT Trust for her efforts at the school. When a petition of complaint signed by thousands was handed in, nothing public was ever done by the Archdiocese.

Since then the Archbishop and his CES launched their ''homophobic bullying'' materials. As a number of Catholic commentators noted at the time, these have promoted the idea that homosexuals were ''made that way'' by God.

Will ''Made That Way'' Hold Sway?

In a certain sense, this brings us full circle to Pope Francis' words this week to Juan Carlos Cruz of Chile; to whom Francis is supposed to have suggested that ''God made you gay''. According to all the world's big media outlets, and thus to popular opinion the world over, this is what he did say. And certainly, there has been no denial from Francis...

The problems faced by parents thus become more pronounced and more clear. 

For it is easy to see how a parent trying to withdraw a child from lessons they deem to be inappropriate, or for that matter anybody not wanting to promote LGBT ideology in workplace situations, might now face the following kind of scenario.

Headteacher/Boss: So, I hear you don't want to take part in this. But it is the law, so you have to.

Parent/Employee: But it is against the teachings of my religion.

Headteacher/Boss: Oh really? But your Pope has just said ''Gay is OK''.

Of course, this is why everyone needs to be well instructed in both natural and divine law arguments, matters of freedom of conscience and conscientious objection and precise definitions of the nature, telos and limits of papal authority, etc.

Embedded Across Curricula?

However, there is another dimension to all of this which needs to be noted.

Whilst Archbishop McMahon suggests that materials will be adapted to suit the Catholic ethos, and leaving aside for a moment the fact that this has not happened in key cases up to now, it is also the case that this new announcement in Wales about LGBT material being ''embedded'' into all school curricula shows how difficult it will be for parents to observe absolutely all of the content being taught and also to remove children from key lessons.

For the LifeSiteNews report would seem to suggest that the LGBT materials could crop up in all areas of the curriculum.

Be Informed, But Have Trust; Hope and Pray!

At the top of our post today is a picture of St. Winefride of Wales, the great abbess who, in her youth, suffered gravely and yet victoriously to preserve her chastity and holy innocence.

As St. Winefride is known in her beautiful litany as the ''Fair Flower of Ancient Wales'', and as a powerful intercessor and model for holy purity, we highly recommend all parents and children to commend themselves to her protection.

May her prayers and example help us all not to lose hope, to remain united with Christ who assured her victory and that of all who love and trust in Him, and to remain faithful to the truly Christian education of youth for the Kingdom of Heaven. Home schooling and/or local Catholic small scale schooling look better options every day!

The complex of ancient buildings surrounding St. Winefride's Well at Holywell in North Wales. It is a place dear to our hearts and central to our vocation as a married couple; for, as we described on our 15th wedding anniversary last April, we believe that St. Winefride helped to bring us together.

St. Winefride and All Saints of Wales - pray for us!

An Important Event

N.B. - We see from the good LMS Wrexham blog-site that there will be a Traditional Latin Mass at St. Winefride's Catholic Church, just up the hill from the ancient Holy Well of St. Winefride, at 11:30am this Trinity Sunday, 27th May, 2018, offered by Canon Parant of the ICKSP. Readers in the region are encouraged to attend where possible and all readers are invited to pray to the great St. Winefride for a renewal of chastity in our own hearts, in the wider society and particularly in the field of education of youth. Please also pray for the rights and duties of parents and their children to be upheld.

May we also recommend to all parents, priests, teachers, catechists and other interested parties a close reading of Pope Pius XI's Divini Illius Magistri (1929), and the Pontifical Council for the Family's The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality (1995). 

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This news item is from Torch of The Faith
( http://www.torchofthefaith.com/news.php?extend.1695 )