The Transition from Moral Rules to Moral Skills in Catholic Sex Education, 1945-1975

Jane McCamant, University of Chicago

All organizations must somehow reproduce their own moral and cultural authority. For religious organizations, who place moral authority at the center of their institutional purpose, this is a perennially urgent practical problem. The Roman Catholic Church in the post-World-War-II United States faced steadily increasing pressure on its moral authority, coming to a crisis point with the widespread rejection of the Pope’s teaching on birth control in 1968’s Humanae vitae. This paper considers this broader task of moral authority maintenance through a case study of sex education curriculum reform in the schools of the Archdiocese of Chicago in the early 1970s, situating the the post-Vatican II changes to Catholic sex-education practice in the broader history of changes to moral education in Catholic schools across the postwar period. The example of sex education suggests a pattern of change within Catholic schools whereby the cultivation of individual moral skills was emphasized in opposition to the (more traditional) collective obedience to moral rules.

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 Presented in Session 143. Organizing for Change: Ecumenism, Inclusion and Morality