On 12 September 2020, a letter from the (UK) Coalition in Defence of Primary Educators was delivered to H.E. Vincent Cardinal Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster and President of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW), regarding the CBCEW’s support for legislation imposing pro-LGBT Relationships and Sex Education on school-children in England.

The letter, which can be read in full here, was signed by the leaders of the groups making up the Coalition, James Leatherland (Catholic Man UK), Dr Joseph Shaw (the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales) and John Smeaton (Society for the Protection of Unborn Children).

John Smeaton says: “We wrote the letter as Catholic fathers with the responsibility for the moral education and spiritual formation of our children”.

The Coalition’s letter to Cardinal Nichols concludes:

“Before delivering this letter to you today, we knelt and prayed the Rosary for you on the Piazza in front of Westminster Cathedral. We, and the members of the groups which we lead, most of them parents like ourselves, are praying and offering sacrifices for you and for your brother bishops in England and Wales, and we respectfully ask you to pray for us. As parents, we share with you, our bishops, the certainty that, on Judgement Day, we will be accountable to God for the eternal souls of the children in our care, and not to the Government for the implementation of their ideological and corrupt agenda.

“Above all our prayer is that the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, endowed with the authority of Christ to teach the Catholic faith, will change direction and lead parents in Britain, both Catholic and non-Catholic, in resisting legislation which threatens the immortal souls of our nation’s children. In this connection, we note, with some appreciation, signs of such an approach beginning to be adopted by the CES under Bishop Stock, its new chairman. We pray that this new approach will be sustained and developed further now that the Children & Social Work Act (2017), making the new subjects of Relationships Education compulsory in all English primary schools, and Relationships and Sex Education compulsory in all English secondary schools, comes into force this month, albeit with a partial reprieve until the start of summer term 2021 due to the recent national lockdown.”