Cardinals and Condoms
Every five seconds someone somewhere is infected with HIV/Aids. Most cases occur in sub-Saharan Africa but incidences of the virus are increasing year on year in every continent on the globe. Based on the World Health Organisation's estimated figures, by the time next week's edition of The OxStu comes out a further 120,960 people will have become infected. As yet, there is no effective cure for Aids.
It is against this background that the comments made last week by Godfried Danneels, a senior Cardinal in the Catholic Church, are extremely welcome. Appearing on Dutch television, Cardinal Danneels argued that there was a moral difference between using condoms to prevent conception and using them to prevent death: "When someone is HIV-positive and his partner says 'I want to have sex with you,' then he does not have to do it. But if he does, he has to use a condom. Otherwise he will commit a sin." At a time when many of the countries with the most serious Aids problems, such as Brazil, are strongly Catholic, the Belgian's intervention has won praise from many who believe that a softening of the Church's line on condom use could help bring about an abatement in the spread of the virus in these areas.
The official position of the Vatican remains firmly opposed to the use of condoms, or any form of contraception, in any context, a policy which has its roots in the Humanae Vitae issued by Pope Paul VI in the Sixties after the invention of the contraceptive pill. Yet Cardinal Danneels' remarks highlight the overwhelming imperative present throughout the Catechism of the Catholic Church to preserve human life as something sacred, an imperative which he believes would be violated by a person who was aware that he or she was HIV-positive engaging in unprotected sex.
This is not the first time that a figure from within the Catholic Church has spoken out against official policy. Last year Father Valeriano Paitoni, an Italian priest who works with Aids patients in Saõ Paulo, was swiftly rebuked after making comments in a similar vein to those made by Cardinal Danneels. In one of the programmes in the BBC's series on Aids in November Kevin Dowling, the Catholic Bishop of Rustenberg, South Africa, spoke of the large number of people in his country, particularly women, forced into prostitution by poverty, and who "have no options in terms of choices along the moral lines that the church proclaims." These cases and others demonstrate the widening gap between the Vatican itself and many of the members of the Church who work with Aids sufferers in different countries and who are beginning to call for a rethinking of the attitude towards the use of condoms in specific contexts.
Of course there will be many who maintain that such a thing as a re-thinking is utterly inconceivable when one is dealing with the word of God. However, it would be a grave misunderstanding of Cardinal Danneels's argument to think that he is proposing that even one letter of the divine law be changed. He is not. In his interview the Cardinal was very clear in his conviction that abstinence was the best course of action for someone infected with HIV, but was also willing to address the reality that there are many people for whom this is not a practical option who will nevertheless still look to the Church for guidance, and to its local representatives for support and advice. What he is right to consider is the fact that the world changes and that Christianity must be constantly seeking to apply its central truths to new problems and new dilemmas if it does not wish to be seen as increasingly irrelevant to people's lives. The debate stimulated by his comments is vital for the survival of a healthy church, and is certainly preferable to the claim made in October of last year by the Vatican and damned as "dangerous and untrue" by the WHO that condoms contained "pores" that would not stop the transmission of the HIV virus. That condoms are never 100 per cent effective is clearly true, but to dispute that their use by people particularly at risk from HIV might go some way to slowing down the spread of the disease is difficult to comprehend.
It would be easy to think that this debate amounts to nothing more than an internal wrangling going on at the heart of an outdated institution, but this is not the case. The Catholic Church has done, and continues to do a huge amount of good in some of the poorest areas in the world, and its potential for influencing the behaviour of over a billion believers around the globe is enormous. It is a peculiarly modern fallacy to assume that a person or organisation that changes his or its mind at some point must be guilty of inconsistency, but if the world changes in ways that we could not have foreseen, it is our duty to reconsider whether our lasting moral imperatives are still best served by the attitudes we hold in regard to specific situations. Whatever one's personal belief, it is impossible not to sympathise with the predicament of many Catholics working in difficult situations who are effectively asked to choose between preserving life and following the teachings of their religious leaders. There is a great weight of responsibility on the shoulders of those in authority to act, as Cardinal Danneels has done, with bravery, love for life, and a desire to preserve it whenever it is in one's power to do so.
22nd Jan 2004