P-I Focus: As millions succumb to AIDS, ban on condoms jeopardizes church's position as moral leader

Although individual priests and nuns as well as Catholic families risked their lives to protect Jews in World War II, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church declined to challenge Adolf Hitler as he ran amuck through Europe, thereby tarnishing its claim as a global moral leader.


Wendy Wahman

Now a viral version of Hitler is rampaging through another part of the world, and the Vatican risks similar ignominy if it cannot find a way to relax the ban on condoms, particularly in Africa where more than 25 million people have been infected with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus.

On the inexorably intertwined subject of AIDS, sex and condoms, religious and political leaders in South Africa, where one of every nine people is HIV-positive, have been unaccustomedly and unacceptably mute.

One figure who has been fairly outspoken is former South African President Nelson Mandela, who takes pains to explain to the rest of the world that sex still isn't an acceptable topic in his culture. In Mandela's view, increasing the use of condoms is definitely one method, though not the only one, of lessening AIDS' hold on his homeland.

Unlike those whose heads are still stuck in the sub-Saharan sand, Mandela knows that once people have chosen to have sex, the most successful way to prevent HIV infection during intercourse is a condom. That reality was reaffirmed last month by a panel of 28 American experts who analyzed more than 138 peer-reviewed, published studies on the topic. The studies showed an 85 percent decrease in the risk of HIV transmission among consistent condom users versus non-users.

In the same month that condoms were being touted in the United States as reliable, practical and inexpensive, they were being savaged again by church officials in South Africa. On the agenda for the annual meeting of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference was a proposal by one bishop, who ministers directly to AIDS victims, to sanction condoms as part of a larger effort to stop the spread of the disease.

Ignoring the adage that you're not supposed to say anything if you can't say something good, the bishops instead lambasted the condom as an "immoral and misguided weapon" against AIDS.

They even said, incredibly, that "condoms may even be one of the main reasons for the spread of HIV/AIDS." Come again?

"Apart from the possibility of condoms being faulty or wrongly used, they contribute to the breaking down of self-control and mutual respect," they noted.

However, in one small way, the bishops did propose easing the blanket prohibition. They will recommend to the Vatican that married couples be able to use condoms if one partner or both partners is infected, and they abstain from sex while the woman is ovulating. This way, it wouldn't be the condom that was preventing the creation of life.

Also, predictably, the bishops said condom distribution programs -- minimal as they are -- should be replaced with efforts to promote abstention from sex.

And so, though the Vatican last September proclaimed the church should not appear indifferent to the plight of those infected with AIDS and should campaign to halt its spread, the bishops closest to ground zero in the pandemic stood their ground.

Are the faithful to expect that the Vatican will heal them through consolation and comfort once they are incapacitated with AIDS, though using a condom during sex could ward off the initial infection?

That's as preposterous as thinking that abstinence is the most realistic contraceptive for hormone-crazed teens. Saying no works for some; it doesn't for others, even Catholics.

In the face of the evil that is AIDS, this message has proved woefully unsuccessful, and there are scores of children who've lost their parents to AIDS or been infected with AIDS by their parents to prove it.

At this point AIDS is as much of a plague in Africa as Adolf Hitler was in Europe. In time the death toll will dwarf that of the Holocaust. What the Vatican should say is: Condoms can save lives, not just prevent them.

Kimberly Mills is Focus editor and a member of the Editorial Board. E-mail: kimberlymills@seattlepi.com.

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