Catholicism and Education

After obtaining the answer to my question is AIDS a big deal through data for Erie County, I now asked myself a subsequent question: Why was I so unaware of the high rates of AIDS? I can trace my lack of knowledge back to my religious and educational background, one rooted in Catholicism.  I attended a Catholic grammar school, from grades kindergarten through eighth, and a Catholic all girls high school.  In health class, which I was mandated to take for one trimester for three years, grades sixth through eighth, we were required to learn the symptoms and treatments of various STDs, ranging from gonorrhea to genital warts to herpes.  We spent about two days on the STD unit each year, and often the information was accompanied by expressions of disgust at the description of signs of genital herpes.  Sixth grade was the only grade in which we discussed AIDS; I remember my teacher gave us a long list of the ways through which could and could not be spread.  By the end of the year, the only information I knew about the disease consisted of the possibility of spread through sex and the impossibility of spread through “casual contact”, such as hugging or shaking hands.  Due to the Catholic inclinations of my school, STDs and AIDS were presented not as fatal diseases but as dirty, unsanitary epidemics that resulted from promiscuous and immoral behavior.  People who acquired such diseases such as Chlamydia or herpes could blame no one but themselves; when individuals took the risk of engaging in depraved behavior, the consequences which they received represented self-inflicted injuries.  The idea of an AIDS “victim” was nonexistent in my grammar school; I possessed no awareness of the fact that AIDS could be spread from a mother to a child or through blood transfusions.  My school offered me one solution for the unseemliness and impurity of STDs and AIDS which was repeated incessantly: abstinence.  The summary of my STD unit in health class consisted of the oversimplified and quixotic maxim: don’t have sex before marriage and you won’t get STDs.  My school never once mentioned protected sex or condoms; the answer to all of these polluted diseases was simple: don’t have sex.  An article from my local newspaper, The Buffalo News, epitomizes the Catholic vantage point regarding AIDS.  In response to a “real world tactic” to combat HIV and AIDS, the administration of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg distributed free condoms beginning on February 14, accumulating an expense of $720,000 annually.  In response to the condom giveaway, an endeavor to address the fact that more than 100,000 of New York’s 8.2 million residents possess HIV or AIDS, Cardinal Edward Egan and Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio released a statement that claimed that City Hall Leaders “fail to protect he moral tone of our community” by “blanketing our neighborhoods with condoms”.  Religious views, which deemed the giveaway as “tragic and misguided”, deviated sharply from political views, as the condom giveaway program, which distributes 1.5 million condoms each month, was described by Bloomberg as a means through which the Health Department attempts to work with the “real world of people”, who are not “practicing protected sex, not practicing abstinence.  AIDS reveals a schism in contemporary society, a presence of two worlds: on attempting to deal with reality, the secular, and one that adheres to the conviction that “the only way to protect against HIV and AIDS is through abstinence before marriage”, the religious.  The statements of the Catholic community manifest the conservative and moral imbued views of my Catholic educational background; rather than being encouraged to face the “real world” of promiscuity and sex, due to my religious foundation, I was guarded from the prevalence of AIDS and offered solely one option for averting the disease; abstinence. 

St. Gregory the Great

Nardin Academy's Catholic tradition is integral to its identity as a school; therefore, religious studies courses are required of all students regardless of religious affiliation. With this in mind, the religion department imparts to our students the elements of Catholic faith and practice through a holistic curriculum that includes the study of Roman Catholicism, Scripture, social justice, religious and moral issues, theology and religious experience."

Nardin Academy Chapel