Catholics and Condoms
Will the pope change the church’s stand? The Vatican is currently engaged in a complex debate—and a major part of it is whether condoms could turn marital sex into something considered evil.
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 4:18 p.m. ET May 3, 2006
May 3, 2006 - The Roman Catholic Church is committed to honor and preserve life. But how best to do that? General principles are easy enough to pronounce, but specific cases are the source of enormous anger and misunderstanding, both inside and outside the church, and none has been more contentious than Vatican opposition to the use of condoms to fight AIDS.
So when news broke in Italy last week that Pope Benedict XVI might reconsider the church’s stand in the case of married couples where one partner is infected, a momentous change seemed to be in the offing. Some commentators, noting this pope’s background as John Paul II’s theological enforcer, made analogies with Richard Nixon’s epochal trip to China. Only someone with Benedict’s reputation for conservative orthodoxy, they suggested, could change church practice on this issue while reconciling it with doctrine that’s been firmly established since the 1968 papal ban on all contraception.
But like so many issues considered at the Vatican, where cardinals in past centuries were accused of debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, the condom issue is fraught with such complexities that even Benedict may have trouble sorting them out.
“This is one of those cases where it’s really anybody’s call at this point,” says Father Thomas D. Williams, dean of theology at Regina Apostolorum University in Rome. “Bishops, moral theologians—everybody who’s seriously involved in this is really divided. I don’t know that the pope will find either side sufficiently convincing.”
What Benedict did about two months ago, according to the Rome daily newspaper La Repubblica, was to ask the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, headed by Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, to consider the issue as part of a broad look at several questions of bioethics. "My department is carefully studying it, along with scientists and theologians entrusted with drawing up a document about the subject," Barragán told the Italian paper.
In Africa, where the Roman Catholic Church and its affiliated charities often play a vital role in delivering health care to the poor and solace to the dying, the issue of how best to address the raging epidemic of AIDS is especially critical. The church preaches abstinence as the best prevention. Many within church organizations contend that condoms give a false sense of security while encouraging dangerous promiscuity. But non-Catholic health workers often regard that position as unconscionable and see the debate as one in which the theoretical possibility of preventing life with condoms has to be weighed against the statistical probability of losing millions of lives without them.
According to UNAIDS, the United Nations program on HIV/AIDS prevention, “Condoms are the only devices currently available that protect against the sexual transmission of HIV, and they are a mainstay of HIV prevention programs. The male latex condom is the single most efficient technology available to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.” Indeed, one of the great problems for those fighting the spread of AIDS is, precisely, finding ways to protect wives from being infected by their husbands. According to U.N. statistics, “only 4.9 percent of married women of reproductive age use condoms. Many women find it hard or impossible to negotiate with their partners to use condoms.”
