Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia has placed youth at risk worldwide by the development and release of the online “Meeting Point” program of obscene sexual education for youth in five languages that deliberately excludes parents. This program was developed under his leadership at the Pontifical Council of the Family.
The pornographic imagery and much of the negative sexual innuendo that was in the program when released on World Youth Day, 2016 is sexually abusive of youth and places them at risk of being abused. This type of material, designed to arouse sexual feelings, is similar to that used by adult sexual predators to prey upon adolescents. This betrayal of youth raises grave questions about the integrity of the entire program.
International pro-family leaders have called it “thoroughly immoral,” “entirely inappropriate,” and “quite tragic.”
The psychiatric opinion from one expert in clerical abuse stated:
“My immediate professional reaction was that this obscene and pornographic approach abuses youth psychologically and spiritually. As a professional who has treated both priest perpetrators and the victims of the abuse crisis in the Church, what I found particularly troubling was that the pornographic images in this program are similar to those used by adult sexual predators of adolescents.”
In order to restore the severely damaged trust and faith now so present in the laity, it is incumbent upon the members of the Hierarchy and priests that they never again act as permissive leaders/shepherds when serious threats are posed to the moral, intellectual, psychological, and sexual well-being of youth. Given the damaged trust, the Church must proactively take steps where there is the slightest suspicion of unhealthy attitudes toward youth.
In justice, Archbishop Paglia, who was responsible for the development and release of the Meeting Point program, which spreads obscene and sexually arousing material to adolescents and obviates the oversight of their parents, should be required to go through an evaluation similar to the one used with priests who are accused of placing youth at risk. The computer that he used when he approved the release of the online “Meeting Point” program should be taken and searched. We request this justice.
Such a review is particularly important as he is now in charge of further teaching regarding sexuality and marriage at the John Paul II Institute for Family Studies, where his flawed teaching will become mainstreamed.
The Meeting Point program constitutes sexual abuse of Catholic adolescents worldwide and reveals an ignorance of the enormous sexual pressure upon youth today and of the basics of how to teach Christian attitudes to sexuality and chastity. It will certainly result in their subsequent confusion in accepting the Church’s teaching.
This sexually-charged approach represents a grave future crisis in the Church, particularly for Catholic youth and families, which will mirror the scandalous sexual abuse crisis of youth so widely reported in the press. Catholic parents will find themselves in the shocking position of having to protect their children from the sexual teaching coming from the Church, as is now the case in the Dioceses and parishes which have immediately welcomed this extremely flawed program.
The words of St. John Paul II at his meeting with the American cardinals and bishops on April 23, 2002, on the crisis in the Church are as timely today as they were then for the members the hierarchy, and particularly true for the Vatican. He stated: “People must know that bishops and priests are totally committed to the fullness of Catholic truth on matters of sexual morality, a truth as essential to the renewal of the priesthood and the episcopate as it is to the renewal of marriage and family life.”
