New Anti-Catholic Sex-Education Guidelines in Hamburg Are Fruit of German Synodal Way, Say Experts
Catholic parents wishing to protect their children from such education face ‘complete entrapment,’ say pro-family advocates, as home schooling is banned in Germany and they are obliged to pay the church tax.
St. Michael's
Church exterior in Hamburg, Germany (photo: Shutterstock)
Edward Pentin EducationJune 26, 2025
HAMBURG, Germany — Advocates of Catholic marriage and the family are hoping that Pope Leo XIV intervenes to help parents protect their children in the face of new sex-education guidelines being imposed in a major German diocese that promote the LGBT agenda, including transvestitism and non-binary identities.
They say the new guidelines are further proof of the abandonment of Catholic moral teaching in society, a fruit of the 2019-2023 German Synodal Way, and part of a “complete entrapment” of Catholic parents who wish to shield their children from such “indoctrination.”
The Archdiocese of Hamburg published June 5 a “new framework for sex education in Catholic schools,” which it trumpeted as “sending a clear signal for contemporary, values-based, and scientifically grounded sexual pedagogy.”
Its implementation, said the archdiocese’s vicar general, Pallotine Father Sascha-Philipp Geißler, is “an important step towards development attitudes, achieving justice in our schools, and strengthening teachers and all educational staff.”
He claimed it does not introduce a new theology, but rather “acceptance of diversity regarding sexual orientations and gender identity.” He also said they are advocating “a life-affirming and, in this sense, positive view of sexuality.”
The archdiocese issued a statement June 5 that said that “the recognition of different identities and sexual orientations is actively promoted” and that “discrimination and taboos” are to be “consciously dismantled.”
Christopher Haep, head of the archdiocesan department for schools and universities, said the archdiocese wants Catholic schools “to be safe places where sexuality is not taboo, but is recognized in all its complexity and dignity.”
“Perspectives and value systems have changed in recent decades,” he contended, “and accordingly we, too, must be able to provide contemporary answers to the questions of children and young people.”
Summing up the program, the archdiocese listed its different elements, which included “holistic sex education” (conveyed in a “gender-sensitive” way), “promotion of relationship competence” (handling of “one’s own and others’ feelings”), and empowering young people to “develop their identity.”
“Training opportunities and external expertise” will be provided, the archdiocese said, while Haep boasted that the archdiocese is positioning itself “as a pioneer of forward-looking sex education that combines Christian values with openness and respect.”
The new guidelines will be implemented beginning with the 2026-2027 school year at all 15 Catholic schools in Hamburg and “regularly evaluated to ensure and further develop the impact of the framework.”
The archdiocese is headed by Archbishop Stefan Heße, who in 2018 called for the Catholic Church to take a more open approach to sexuality and for the issue of homosexuality to be reclassified theologically.
The announcement of the guidelines also comes at a time when the Hamburg Archdiocese is close to being dissolved and possibly amalgamated into other dioceses, having suffered for years from serious financial problems and a dearth of vocations. Last year, it recorded no new priestly ordinations.
Strong Criticisms
Leading pro-family-and-marriage Catholics have decried the guidelines, which they say are part of a so-called “Comprehensive Sexuality Education” based on the work of Uwe Sielert, emeritus professor of “sexual sciences” at the Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel.
The founder of Germany’s sex-education program, Sielert was a student of the late professor Helmut Kentler, who, according to DemoFürAlle, a pro-family advocacy group, was a notorious proponent of pedophilia, a “central figure in a pedophilic abuse network,” and the originator of “emancipatory sex education” that has taken root across Germany.
Kentler “built up a sex-education universe with the Institute for Sex Education, which he founded in 1988,” said Hedwig von Beverfoerde, founder of DemoFürAlle. Sielert then became “the link between Kentler’s sex-education visions and political sponsors and enablers,” before going on to “transform Kentler’s agenda,” supplementing Kentler’s approach “with the modern neo-emancipatory intention of breaking up the heteronormative attitudes and images of children.”
Von Beverfoerde told the Register June 25 that the Hamburg framework “incorporates the highly questionable and unscientific ideas” of Kentler, “who falsely claimed that children are inherently sexual beings — a dangerous claim which leads to the idea that adults would have to introduce children into sexuality.”
She said his ideology has found its way into university and school curricula and even into the World Health Organization’s sex-education standards for Europe. Furthermore, she said the Hamburg framework is “ideologically in line with the ideas of the Synodal Way, which seeks to relativize Catholic sexual teaching and normalize LGBTQ ideologies within the Church.” The erosion of doctrine in this field “is not accidental,” she added. “It is part of a broader agenda, which why it is so difficult to resist.”
German Catholic writer and sociologist Gabriele Kuby also believes the Hamburg framework is “in accordance with the resolutions” of the Synodal Way, a four-year consultation with the laity in which the clerical sex-abuse scandal was used to usher in radical changes to the Church in Germany. She also sees it as a consequence not only of what she has called a societal “relapse into the barbarism of paganism” but also a failure to adequately counter the abandonment of Catholic sexual morality.
Pope Francis intervened several times to halt the process, she acknowledged, “but only on the issue of dissolving the authority of the bishop by the intention of sharing it with laity” — that is, with the powerful Zentralkomitee der deutschen Katholiken, headed by Irme Stetter-Karp “who advocates the increase of abortion facilities.”
Von Beverfoerde believes this form of sex education is “very likely” to be replicated across German dioceses, adding that “similar concepts and language appear in inter-diocesan policy papers, which makes it difficult for a single bishop or diocese to dissent and go a more traditional way.”
Kuby, who has been at the forefront of the battle against gender ideology, wrote in her 2023 book Fürchte dich nicht du kleine Herde: wenn die Hirten mit den Wölfen tanzen(Fear Not, Little Flock: When the Shepherds Dance with the Wolves) that the cross of Christ has been replaced in Germany with the rainbow flag, the symbol of the LGBT movement. Priests and faithful who want to remain true to Jesus, she said, “now face a choice in most dioceses: loyalty to the revealed truth, or obedience to the bishop — a diabolical alternative.”
‘Checkmated at Every Turn’
Dr. Thomas Ward, president of the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family, told the Register that German Catholic parents now face “complete entrapment:” Firstly, they cannot home school, as it is against the law in Germany, and they risk fines, removal of their children and jail if they attempt it; and secondly, they have to pay the church tax, some of which is used to fund such sexual “indoctrination” of their children. Failure to pay it leads to severe ecclesial penalties effectively amounting to excommunication, although it is not formally labeled as such.
“Why should loving parents, the primary educators who have given life to their children, be forced to pay for their corruption?” Ward asked. “Catholic parents are checkmated at every turn; it’s an utterly evil trap. St. John Paul never tired of teaching that the future of the Church passes by way of the family. Both have been hijacked in Germany.”
Kuby said the Church in Germany has long reached the “peak of the abandonment of teaching Catholic morality in Catholic schools and kindergarten,” adding that, for years, Catholic parents “never got any support from their bishops,” not even from solidly orthodox Church leaders such as the late Cardinal Joachim Meisner. “Priests avoid the subject since they would most likely suffer severe consequences if they did speak out,” Kuby said.
To combat this ongoing trend, Ward said that “parents need to organize, as it were, lifeboats” to rescue their families from this situation, and he urged them to “associate with other parents to oppose this usurping of their rights by state and hierarchy.”
Parents have a right and irrevocable duty to provide a Catholic moral education for their children he said, and, quoting Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, written specifically to Catholic families in Hitler’s Germany, he added that if education profanes “the temple of the child’s soul,” then it is “every one’s duty to sever his responsibility from the opposite camp and free his conscience from guilty cooperation with such corruption.”
Von Beverfoerde said such sex education “must be removed from all educational institutions,” adding that it undermines “scientific truth” as well as Christian anthropology and the Church’s moral teaching.
In the meantime, she said parents have some limited options available. They can defer to canon law, specifically Canons 793, 796 and 803 that underpin the rights of Catholic parents with regards to their children’s education; find like-minded parents, as Ward suggests; address their concerns to school administrators; appeal to their bishop, the Vatican, and their constitutional rights; and, if all that fails, find another school, “as difficult as that may be.”
“I strongly hope and pray that the new Holy Father Leo XIV will explicitly reaffirm traditional Catholic sexual morality and call on bishops and priests in Germany and worldwide to teach and implement it faithfully in diocesan schools and kindergartens,” she said.
“A clear and courageous stance from Rome is essential to halt these doctrinal deviations and restore the integrity of Catholic education,” said von Beverfoerde. “Especially if Rome wants to fight child abuse, it is necessary to stop ideas which destroy a child’s innocence.”
- Keywords:
- sex education
- hamburg
- german synodal way
- church teaching on sexuality
- protecting children and youth
Edward Pentin Edward Pentin is the Register’s Senior Contributor and EWTN News Vatican Analyst. He began reporting on the Pope and the Vatican with Vatican Radio before moving on to become the Rome correspondent for EWTN's National Catholic Register. He has also reported on the Holy See and the Catholic Church for a number of other publications including Newsweek, Newsmax, Zenit, The Catholic Herald, and The Holy Land Review, a Franciscan publication specializing in the Church and the Middle East. Edward is the author of The Next Pope: The Leading Cardinal Candidates (Sophia Institute Press, 2020) and The Rigging of a Vatican Synod? An Investigation into Alleged Manipulation at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family (Ignatius Press, 2015). Follow him on Twitter at @edwardp
