MANASSAS, Va. – In a speech that was largely reported on for its focus on asking those who had been abused by Catholic priests for forgiveness, Pope Francis also talked at length about the right of parents to decide the moral and religious education of their children, according to News.va.

“And in this regard I would like to express my rejection of any kind of educational experimentation with children. We cannot experiment with children and young people,” the Holy Father reportedly said. “The horrors of the manipulation of education that we experienced in the great genocidal dictatorships of the twentieth century have not disappeared; they have retained a current relevance under various guises and proposals and, with the pretense of modernity, push children and young people to walk on the dictatorial path of ‘only one form of thought.”

The Holy Father also reportedly warned against the dangers “posed by contemporary culture and widespread mentality propagated by the mass media.”

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

Dr. Andrew Seeley, executive director of the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education and a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, Calif., warned in “The Common Core vs. the Classical Roots of Catholic Education” that the goals and methods of the Common Core are fundamentally at odds with the discovery of Truth at the heart of an authentically Catholic education.

Seeley stated his belief that “under the guise of mutual understanding, curricular materials are likely to usher in an aggressively secular orthodoxy,” and the Common Core will in fact become a “dictatorship of relativism.”

Catholic Education Daily is an online publication of The Cardinal Newman Society. Click here for email updates and free online membership with The Cardinal Newman Society.

– See more at: http://www.cardinalnewmansociety.org/CatholicEducationDaily/DetailsPage/tabid/102/ArticleID/3192/Pope-Francis-Defends-Parents%E2%80%99-Right-to-Decide-%E2%80%98Moral-and-Religious%E2%80%99-Education-for-Children.aspx#sthash.olRvMNaf.dpuf