Pope Francis’s recent remarks on clerical sexual abuse received plenty of deserved attention in the secular press. Less attention, however, has been paid to other no less emphatic comments he made in that same appearance, perhaps because they were so thoroughly traditional in reaffirming, in his words, “the right of children to grow up in a family with a father and a mother capable of creating a suitable environment for the child’s development and emotional maturity.”

What’s more, Francis decried all efforts at “educational experimentation with children,” noting that “The horrors of the manipulation of education that we experienced in the great genocidal dictatorships of the twentieth century have not disappeared.”

As he put it, “They [children] are not guinea pigs in a laboratory.” Not the sort of language, I suspect, his progressive admirers would expect from him this Easter season — or any time. You can hear and watch them delivered in the video below from the Catholic News Service.

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