The Congregation for Catholic Education presents sex education as part of the integral formation of the person, ordered toward life as a child of God. Sexuality embraces bodily, psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions; men and women possess equal dignity while remaining complementary, and the body expresses a vocation to reciprocal self-giving and fecundity. Marriage unites love and procreation, while virginity or celibacy for the Kingdom offers another form of self-gift. The guidelines seek a positive account that avoids both reducing sexuality to pleasure and treating it as shameful, while acknowledging original sin and cultural confusion.

Education must form understanding, emotions, will, self-control, modesty, responsibility, and freedom, integrating biological knowledge with Christian meaning, prayer, the sacraments, virtue, friendship, and selfless love. Parents retain the primary right and duty, supported by schools, parishes, clergy, religious communities, and bishops in a trusting partnership. Instruction should be gradual, truthful, prudent, age-appropriate, and entrusted to properly formed educators; graphic or merely naturalistic materials are rejected. Marriage preparation teaches chastity, fidelity, sacrifice, sacramental vocation, natural fertility regulation, and the rejection of artificial contraception. Sexual intimacy belongs to a lifelong, faithful, unitive, and procreative marriage, while genital acts outside marriage and masturbation are condemned with pastoral attention to personal responsibility. The guidance describes homosexuality as incompatible with full sexual and interpersonal maturity but requires understanding, support, and appropriate professional help, and calls communities to protect children from abuse, pornography, drugs, and other threats to self-control and human development.