North York, ONTARIO (LifeSiteNews) — A Canadian publishing company has halted the publication of books associated with Catholic sex education because they do not include same-sex relationships.
According to the Catholic News Agency (CNA), Ontario’s Pearson Canada has stopped publication of Fully Alive, a controversial “Catholic” sex education curriculum written in 1988.
The program “has been criticized for sexualizing children from a young age, ignoring the Church’s teaching on grace, sin, and modesty, and presenting an overall anthropology at odds with the Church’s vision of the human person,” Pete Baklinski wrote for LifeSiteNews in 2016.
Nevertheless, Fully Alive drew the ire of a gay activist Kyle Iannuzzi for not instructing children on same-sex relationships.
In June 2022, Iannuzzi, a former student in the Toronto Catholic District School Board, wrote to Pearson Canada to complain that their publication of Fully Alive was helping to spread “homophobic” viewpoints.
On January 12, Pearson Canada told CNA that it is currently “in the process of ending its support for Fully Alive,” and that they “stopped printing in December and will stop support for the digital version by March.”
Pearson succumbed to ‘cancel culture’
Halton Catholic District School Board trustee Helena Karabela told LifeSiteNews in an email today that the publishing company’s decision to stop publication of Fully Alive over the issue of traditional marriage is “unfortunate.”
“Pearson Canada’s decision to stop publishing the Fully Alive program due to the program’s support of traditional marriage being exclusively between a man and a woman is unfortunate,” she stated.
“Standing against the ‘cancel culture’ that the publisher has succumbed to is a good thing,” she continued. “As someone who has been cancelled for my pro-life views and efforts in my Catholic school board, I will always support fighting any efforts to cancel the promotion of traditional marriage.”
Karabela said that “a group effort of bishops, their senior clergy, trustees, school board officials and Catholic taxpayers is needed to focus on making sure that the duty to Catholic parents of providing Catholic teaching on sexuality and marriage to students is being fulfilled.”
She added that she supported the January 10, 2023 statement of the Institute for Catholic Education (ICE), an arm of the Ontario bishops, which asserted:
In choosing to send their students to a Catholic school, parents rightly expect that the presentation of a family life curriculum will reflect a Catholic view of human life, sexuality, marriage, and family.
‘Many of the world’s religions agree on this traditional view of marriage’
Pearson Canada’s decision to halt publication sparked a writing campaign by Parents as First Educators (PAFE), an Ontario-based group that “supports the authority of parents over the education of their children through grassroots activism.” In an email written to its supporters on January 25, PAFE urged parents to contact the publishing company to show support for Fully Alive.
“Pearson doesn’t want to publish it because the Church’s teachings on sexuality state that marriage is confined to a man and a woman,” PAFE wrote. “We again encourage you to contact Marlene Olsavsky to express your disappointment with Pearson’s decision to buckle under the woke pressure not to publish this curriculum.”
PAFE also encouraged parents to point out the company’s hypocrisy in attacking religious faith.
“Remind [Olsavsky] that many of the world’s religions agree on this traditional view of marriage,” the group wrote. “Are they also going to stop publishing texts from these traditions as well?”
However, while PAFE backs the Fully Alive program teaching traditional marriage, the textbooks have long been the cause of controversy amongst Catholics. While a better alternative to the former Premier of Ontario Kathleen Wynne’s infamous sex-ed curriculum introduced in 2015, the Fully Alive program has garnered Catholic criticism for introducing children to sexual matters outside a framework of vice and virtue.
Fully Alive panned by Catholics as ‘woefully deficient,’ but it was still far too Christian for gay activists
The now-deceased Auxiliary Bishop Danylak of Toronto had problems with this program as far back as 1998, writing at the time that the program could “contribute to the loss of innocence” in children by educating them on issues that they should not yet even be aware of.
“The Fully Alive program ignores the latency period of our children and therefore can contribute to the loss of innocence,” he wrote. “It gives group instruction in intimate sexual matters although the Church has specifically forbidden this.”
The bishop called Fully Alive “woefully deficient” in the way that it treats moral principles.
“It often ignores the Church’s teaching on sin and grace and modesty,” he said. “The Fully Alive program is not a program for formation in Christian virtue but a program of imparting sexual knowledge to children.”
Paolo De Buono, a gay activist employed as a teacher by the Toronto Catholic District School Board, has taken to Twitter since the announcement to encourage educators everywhere to drop the Fully Alive program and to express his outrage that Catholic school boards still require it.
“The best proof today that publicly-funded Catholic ed should end in ON (& AB, SK) is that despite the clear evidence that Fully Alive teaches homophobia, Catholic leaders are STILL providing it & in most cases requiring it to be taught,” he tweeted on February 2.
The best proof today that publicly-funded Catholic ed should end in ON (& AB, SK) is that despite the clear evidence that Fully Alive teaches homophobia, Catholic leaders are STILL providing it & in most cases requiring it to be taught.@MikeSchreiner https://t.co/ngrA5jfqUX
— Paolo De Buono, 🌈 #BLM, MSc, JD, OCT (@misterdebuono) February 2, 2023
For those who pray or send good wishes, do that for me sometimes.
There are some fanatics in leadership roles in public Catholic #OntEd, who believe that God called them to leadership in a school system meant to “save souls from hell,” & that it’s their role to preserve it.
1/2
— Paolo De Buono, 🌈 #BLM, MSc, JD, OCT (@misterdebuono) February 1, 2023
“To them (as a Catholic teacher who helped 1) persuade Pearson to stop publishing the Fully Alive textbook, 2) encourage Pride recognition & flying the flag at Catholic boards, & 3) red flag all this as a human rights issue), I’m a threat to the system they want to preserve,” his tweet continued.
To them (as a Catholic teacher who helped 1) persuade Pearson to stop publishing the Fully Alive textbook, 2) encourage Pride recognition & flying the flag at Catholic boards, & 3) red flag all this as a human rights issue), I’m a threat to the system they want to preserve.
2/2
— Paolo De Buono, 🌈 #BLM, MSc, JD, OCT (@misterdebuono) February 1, 2023
This is not the first time that Iannuzzi, the open homosexual who complained Pearson was publishing “homophobic” material, has attempted to impose the LGBT agenda on the Catholic school system.
He also played a role in the Michael Del Grande case.
Del Grande is the Toronto Catholic School Board trustee who came under fire after he defended Catholic teaching during a debate over amending the board’s code of conduct to include the terms “gender identity” and “gender expression” as prohibited grounds for discrimination back in 2020. Ianuzzi even wrote to Kathleen Wynne, asking that the ministry “intervene in order to secure the release of the report on the homophobic, bigoted behavior and language of trustee Michael Del Grande.”
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