The sexual education framework of Hamburg’s Catholic schools includes among “first sexual experiences” the caresses an infant receives during hygiene care.
The 62-page document, in force since June 2025, enters classrooms tomorrow in the fifteen schools of the archdiocese. InfoVaticana has examined it in full. Rome has not replied to the letter parents sent to Leo XIV in February nor to the canonical complaint filed in June against Archbishop Stefan Heße.
Unofficial Spanish translation of the original document of the Archdiocese of Hamburg. The original German text can be viewed here.
“Human beings must be regarded as sexual from the very beginning. The positive experience of the gentle touches an infant perceives during bodily hygiene counts among the first sexual experiences.” The sentence does not come from a sexology manual: it appears on page seventeen of the framework “Männlich, weiblich, divers: Rahmenkonzept für sexuelle Bildung an den katholischen Schulen im Erzbistum Hamburg”, the document that, starting tomorrow, governs sexual education in the fifteen Catholic schools of the Archdiocese of Hamburg, from first grade through high school.
What follows that sentence matters as much as the sentence itself. The text refers to sexologist Uwe Sielert, professor emeritus at Kiel, to describe “what important sexual experiences” the young child later has while exploring his or her own body, “playfully” touching another child of the same age, or comparing his or her body with that of older siblings or parents. It concludes with the pedagogical consequence: “Parents play an important role in this phase, because the child’s later perception of his or her own body depends on how the parents react to sexual exploration.”
The definition on which the entire structure rests is also Sielert’s: sexuality as “a general vital energy that uses the body, draws on diverse sources, knows very different forms of expression and is significant in multiple senses.” From this derive five dimensions—identity, relationship, pleasure, fertility and openness to transcendence—and from the third, that pleasure is “a central and driving part of sexuality.” Later the document assigns to sexual education the task of promoting an attentive and dignified shaping of sexual pleasure “throughout the entire arc of human life.” The framework claims to rest on “the findings of the human sciences and modern theology, as well as on the discourse concerning the action texts of the Synodal Forum IV,” and aligns its contents with the sexual-education standards of the Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung, developed with the European regional office of the World Health Organization.
The moral apparatus rests on the seven norms of American religious sister Margaret Farley, presented in the document as “guiding principles that, from a Christian perspective, condition a proper approach to sexuality,” applicable to a relationship “in the constellation in which it is lived.” The source cited is the German edition of Just Love. On that book, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued on 30 March 2012 a Notification signed by Cardinal Levada and approved by Benedict XVI: it warned the faithful that the work is not in conformity with the doctrine of the Catholic Church and therefore cannot be used as a valid expression of its teachings “for orientation or formation sessions.” The Hamburg framework employs it precisely in that context and does not mention the Notification anywhere in its 62 pages.
Twice—in the foundational section and again, in a highlighted box, in the high-school block—the document reproduces a formulation by moral theologian Stephan Goertz according to which it is no longer the concrete form of sexuality practiced that defines the ethical quality of the relationship, but the ethical quality of the relationship that decides the morality of sexuality. In the anthropological chapter, following theologian Christine Büchner, it maintains that plurality in God allows diversity to be understood as divine will and that, consequently, in a life given by God there cannot be a norm valid for all, but rather the unfolding of variety.
The contents begin in first grade, in the subjects of Religion and German, with the aim that pupils treat all people with appreciation “regardless of gender identity and sexual orientation” and accept diverse models of life. In second grade, critical perception of role attributions and “multiple family constellations” are introduced. In fifth and sixth grades, pupils “perceive different sexual identities and accept the diversity of persons and their forms of relationship.” In high school they must be informed about the legal regulation of the civil status “diverse” and about transition, and among the competencies of the love, sexuality and relationship block is that they “ground their own point of view on the termination of pregnancy and defend it theologically in a discursive manner.” In the same block they are asked to explain the indissolubility of marriage from the concept of sacrament and to reflect on the beginning of human life at the fertilization of the ovum.
Six pages of the document are devoted to preparing teachers for conversations with parents who reject what the text calls “sexual pedagogy of diversity.” The chapter is constructed as a fictional dialogue in speech bubbles: on the left, in blue, the “problematic” statement of the parent; on the right, in green, the suggested response. It opens with a recommendation from Sielert: in case of conflict with parents, it may be the school’s task to “take the side of the children.” A note reproduces, as an example of a false premise, a letter sent by some parents to the school department in the summer of 2017. To the objection that addressing homosexuality and transsexuality contradicts Catholic doctrine, the document responds by citing Amoris laetitia and recalling that not all doctrinal, moral or pastoral discussions must be resolved by a magisterial intervention.
In the 62 pages there is not a single citation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, of Humanae vitae, of Veritatis splendor, of Persona humana or of the document “Male and Female He Created Them” that the Congregation for Catholic Education published in 2019 precisely on gender theory in education. Nor does the word chastity appear. The only pontifical document used is Amoris laetitia, in six passages. Gravissimum educationis is cited twice, to support a “positive and prudent sexual education” and the use of advances in psychological science, and never in its third paragraph, which declares parents the primary educators of their children.
The acknowledgments of the document include Monika Stein, prevention delegate of the archdiocese, and Ulli Freund, former collaborator of the Federal Government Commissioner for Issues of Sexual Abuse of Children, both for their critical reading of the draft. A note also informs that various departments of the archdiocese cooperate with “Soorum”, a project for the dissemination of sexual and gender diversity of the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Centrum in Hamburg, whose monitors conduct workshops for school groups.
The “Elternnetzwerk Kinderschutz und Prävention”, which groups more than two hundred parents, teachers, doctors and jurists, has demanded the withdrawal of the framework since 2025. Two meetings with the archdiocese, in December 2025 and February 2026, ended without agreement; in the second, according to the minutes of the parents’ representatives, the archdiocese committed to removing from the text the sources the parents consider pseudoscientific, linked to Sielert and Helmut Kentler. The version accessible today on the website of the Catholic schools of the archdiocese continues to cite Sielert in the body, in the notes and in the bibliography, and no revised version has been published. On 25 February the parents wrote to Archbishop Heße; on the 27th, two representatives delivered to the nunciature in Berlin, to then-Nuncio Nikola Eterović, a letter addressed to Leo XIV and writings for several dicasteries, including that of the Doctrine of the Faith. On 9 March they addressed the President of the German Bishops’ Conference, Heiner Wilmer. In June they filed a canonical complaint against Heße before the Dicastery for Bishops, headed since October 2025 by Archbishop Filippo Iannone, appointed by Leo XIV to the post the Pope himself held between 2023 and the conclave. None of those instances has responded.
Heße, Archbishop of Hamburg since 2015, offered his resignation in March 2021 after acknowledging personal procedural errors in the handling of abuse cases during his time as vicar general of Cologne; Francis rejected it in September of that year. The spokesman of the archdiocese’s school department, Christoph Schommer, told CNA Deutsch that the archdiocese maintains a regular and intense exchange with the parents and their representatives, and that at the time of its entry into force the framework enjoyed broad approval from the general parents’ representation, the school leadership teams and those responsible for school pastoral care.