Teen Star, affective education

Spanish dioceses are sensitive to formation geared at the affective education of their young. The 53rd training course for tutors in the Teen Star program just closed in the diocese of Córdoba, in the Betania de Jesús Nazareno House. The program is presently ongoing in Ciudad Real. “Teen Star” is an affective and sexual education program that focuses on the person as a whole. Young people are starting to understand the value and the importance of their bodies by learning to understand the “signs of fertility.” Courses related to the program are being held across several dioceses.Affective education. Sixty-five people have participated in the course, whose goal is to “extend knowledge to accompany the affective education of young people, thereby enabling them to take decisions freely and responsibly.” Another purpose of the course is also to “promote communication between parents and children.” In fact, “parents are the first, most important educators of their children, and in this field they have a fundamental role: they are educators precisely because they are parents”. But in many cases parents of adolescents are disoriented when they are called to face the difficult task of education. With that awareness, the Teen Star program is geared at helping them in this mission through cooperation and support meetings. Pilar Vigil and Enrique Aranda, along with Biologist Lourdes Sánchez, coordinated the reflections during the course in Córdoba, providing the grounds on which the future tutors will develop their skills, according to the age of the youths. “Teen Star” program is implemented across forty Countries, delving into multifaceted aspects of the human person, such as: emotions, physical body, along with intellectual, spiritual and social facets. The purpose of “Teen Star” is to promote “knowledge of biological phases linked to the sexual and behavioural spheres; the knowledge of the existing relationship between feelings and desires; awareness of self-identity and the value of self-esteem; the discovery of male and female alterity; the identification of subjective and objective behavioural implications; the value of freedom; the development of critical aspects regarding the message of media and fashion; the value of communication and the duration of the relationship.” Another formation course is currently taking place in the diocese of Ciudad Real. Past July, a course for tutors was held in Valencia, in the seat of Saint Úrsula of the Catholic University, where it is possible to attend specialization courses in health, affective and sexual education. After the course the activities of new tutors in parishes and school centres began.A program that comes from America. “Teen Star” was not born in Spain but in the United States, thanks to the missionary nun Hanna Klaus, born in Vienna, who lost a large part of her family in concentration camps. After migrating to the United States she encountered Catholic faith in the family that adopted her. She became a gynaecologist and joined the Congregation of “Mission Sisters.” She lived in Pakistan for many years. At the end of the 1970s, upon return from the USA, Hanna realized there was a deep crisis among the youth, which thereby constituted a new “land of mission”: young people with an increasingly more disoriented affective life. Thus the adventure of Teen Star began, thanks to cooperation between Fr Quay and Mary Lou Bryan. Another important figure is Mrs Pilar Vigil, from Chile, mother of four, gynaecologist, specialized in fertility problems. During a congress in Kenya at the end of the 1990s she met Sister Hanna and that was the beginning of a great friendship between the two women. On that occasion she accepted to become the person of reference of the program in Latin America. Since 2003 Vigil, who teaches at the Pontifical Catholic University in Chile and is a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, is the international coordinator of “Teen Star” and travels throughout the world, including Europe, to hold “tutor” courses for the affective education of youths. In Spain Pilar has two dear friends, Enrique Aranda e Concha Valera. They are married and have a large family. They met at a congress on human fertility in Tenerife in 1998 and gradually started cooperating for the dissemination of Teer Star in Spain.