September 2001 Call to Action News

Southern Africa bishops hew to Vatican line against condoms to prevent AIDS

For a while this summer, it appeared that the bishops' conference for South Africa, Botswana and Swaziland might challenge the Vatican's total ban on condoms, even to prevent the spread of AIDS. Bishop Kevin Dowling said the conference AIDS office favored condoms in order to save lives. Retired Archbishop Denis Hurley agreed. Conference president, Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, sounded open to change. But when the conference met in late July, the debate ended with a pastoral statement totally ruling out condoms, even for married couples.

CTAer Joanna Manning of Toronto, a religious educator and author of Is the Pope Catholic? , was in Africa last year and witnessed firsthand the ravages of the AIDS epidemic. She denounced the bishops' position in an article published in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Her title is, "The Catholic Church isn't pro-life. It's pro-power." She writes:

Even the most rigid interpretation of Catholic ethics has always allowed for exceptions to the rules in cases of necessity or as the lesser of two evils. A woman whose children are starving may justifiably steal a loaf of bread. Nuns working in areas of the world where there's a risk they may be raped are put on the pill. It is morally right to use a condom in order to prevent your sexual partner from dying from the act, even if the secondary effect of this will be to inhibit procreation.

The use of condoms to prevent the transmission of AIDS is not about birth control. It is about death control. The Church's stance on AIDS is not pro-life. It is pro-power, the power of one of the last groups of men left on Earth (along with the Taliban) who assert the right to control the intimate details of the sex lives of millions of women and men - the "simple faithful" as they are known in the Vatican. It is these simple Catholic faithful who are now dying because of the Church's rules about a little piece of latex.

Did the Vatican "get to" the South African bishops? Quite probably. We shall never know. But until other bishops and priests stand up to this demented addiction to power, the levers of papal politics will continue to grind the faces of the poor into the dust. Perhaps one day the remnant of the not-so-simple Catholic faithful may rise up and put the Vatican on trial for crimes against humanity.