Vatican won’t stop pro-LGBT sex ed after parents appeal to Leo XIV

The Dicastery for Culture and Education reaffirmed a 2019 Vatican document against modern gender theory in education but took no action against the controversial pro-LGBT program.

Catholic parents who begged Pope Leo XIV to halt the implementation of pro-LGBT sex education in Hamburg’s Catholic schools received a brief Vatican reply reaffirming Church teaching on gender, but no direct intervention to stop the program.

The pro-LGBT diocesan sex-education guidelines remain set to take effect on August 20.

According to a report published by Italian outlet La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, the Dicastery for Culture and Education responded to the parents’ complaint by pointing to a 2019 Vatican document which rejects modern gender ideology in education, but it did not announce any measure to stop the pro-LGBT Hamburg guidelines from being enforced in Catholic schools.

The Vatican response was sent to Varinia Arauco, a Peruvian-born mother who wrote to Pope Leo XIV and other Vatican officials to raise concerns about the new sexual education guidelines approved by local Hamburg Archbishop Stefan Heße.

According to the “Parents’ Network for Child Protection and Prevention,” the Catholic school guide promotes “a new understanding of sexuality, gender identity, marriage, family and human relationships, and contradicts Catholic teaching as well as the educational mandate of parents.”

Although a delegation from the parents’ network requested a private audience with the Pope, no such meeting was granted. Instead, Matthias Ambros, the German undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, acknowledged Arauco’s complaint and stated that the Vatican’s position “remains that expressed in the document Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education,” published in 2019.

Arauco’s appeal was originally addressed to Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Dicastery for Culture.

The Vatican body reaffirmed general Church principles on the dignity of the human person without addressing the specific concerns raised by the parents or the controversial pro-LGBT elements of the Hamburg diocesan guidelines.

The 2019 Vatican document presents principles that conflict with the approach contained in Heße’s program, including that “[e]ducation in affectivity requires language that is appropriate as well as measured,” particularly because children and adolescents have not yet reached full maturity. 

It also calls for helping students develop critical judgment in the face of what it describes as “the onslaught of new ideas and suggestions, the flood of pornography and the overload of stimuli that can deform sexuality,” quoting from Pope Francis’ post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia.

The Hamburg parents argued that the diocesan guidelines promote the deliberate sexualization of children and young people, undermine or reject the Catholic understanding of sexuality, marriage, and family, and actively promote ideological material concerning sexuality and sexual identity.

The 2019 Vatican document also explicitly defends the right of Catholic schools to maintain their own understanding of human sexuality and links that right to parents’ freedom to educate their children according to an integrated understanding of the human person. It further states that parents possess a natural right to choose an educational approach consistent with human dignity.

Since December 2025, Catholic parents in Hamburg have protested the pro-LGBT sex-education program set to take effect on August 20 in 15 Catholic schools. 

Alongside arguments that the framework contradicts Catholic teaching, the parents also claim that families were not properly informed about the program’s content, that the schools violated diocesan law, and even that migrant students at Catholic schools feel alienated by the new guidelines.

Despite these concerns and the canonical challenge, the archdiocese plans to implement the document, which includes material on gender identity, homosexuality, and contraception, and would be binding for all Catholic schools in Hamburg.