Vatican might soon attain Sexual Maturity in REVERSAL of condom ban

Once again, Nero fiddles while Rome burns... And just like gray burning ballot smoke from the Sistine Chapel stovepipe, the Vatican is blowing more conflicting signals to us while a global pandemic continues to rage...

Forty million people are infected with HIV/AIDS worldwide, including 2.3 million children younger than 15. Almost five million people contracted the HIV virus, which causes AIDS, and a million victims died of the disease last year. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) released figures on World AIDS Day estimating that there are between 36 and 44 million people infected with HIV/AIDS worldwide and about 14,000 new infections daily, mostly through heterosexual sex.

Meanwhile, word has just leaked out from Mexico through Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan (photographed above), who is in charge of the Vatican's health care ministry, and from NBC news tonight, that the Vatican has commissioned and is preparing a document condoning condom use by those with AIDS and other "grave diseases". These promising yet conflicting reports have been diminished by his ultramontane (RC) peers as its balancing act release appears imminent upon the heels of this same recent policy change within the Anglican Church.

Beyond most hopes and our wildest expectations, our still "honey mooning" Holy Father seems to be heeding this particular request of Catholics for a Free Choice who respectfully petitioned Pope Benedict XVI to relax the RC ban on condoms in their suggested timeline of "The First One Hundred Days: The Future Papacy, the Future Church - Catholics for a Free Choice Lays out a Schedule for the New Pope."

"My department is carefully studying it, along with scientists and theologians entrusted with drawing up a document about the subject that will soon be made known," the Mexican Cardinal exclaimed. "It is +Benedict XVI who asked us for a study on this particular aspect of using a condom by those afflicted with AIDS and by those with infectious diseases," His Eminence further stated in Sunday's La Republica newspaper.

Conditions for this RC "dispensation" would ONLY be within a sacramental marriage where one partner is infected with HIV/AIDS and the other is not. Reportedly, the document will insist that this position does not mark a break with the RC Church's traditional ban on birth control, expressed in Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. What would be approved is not contraception, they say, but disease prevention. (Speaking on background, an official in +Lozano Barragàn's office told the National Catholic Reporter that the document will sanction the use of condoms to halt the spread of the disease "inside marriage and the family, not outside of it." The Vatican bureaucrat said the document has been approved by the consultors of the Council for Health Pastoral Care, is now awaiting review from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and should be released soon.)

The Vatican Catholic ultramontane tradition opposes the use of condoms as part of its overall teaching against contraception and advocates sexual abstinence as the best way to combat the spread of the HIV virus, which causes AIDS. (The 1968 encyclical of Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, prohibited all means of artificial contraception. However, His Holiness made it clear that this teaching was not infallible.) Last week, in contradiction to that doctrinal policy, retired Milan Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the liberal dissident Archbishop-Emeritus of Milan and a recent frontrunner papal candidate, said in comments published in the Italian newsweekly L'Espresso that condoms were the "lesser evil" in combating the spread of AIDS.

That moral argument stretches back nearly two millenniums, to the idea that The Church has a responsibility, in difficult moral cases, to advocate the "lesser evil." However, the "lesser evil" argument is not universally accepted among ethicists and other Catholic thinkers. Besides, the theology is complicated. Issues to consider especially include the user's intent: whether it is possible to use a condom without the intention of contraception. "It is not considering that using a condom is morally good or right," Fr. Brian V. Johnstone, a moral theologian at the Alphonsian Academy in Rome said. "You are simply trying to persuade that person to do the lesser evil — but it is still considered evil."

His perception is not unprecedented and lends renewed consideration to the theological doctrine called the “principle of double effect” by many pragmatists within the Church hierarchy (This principle notes that condoms have two functions: to prevent conception and to prevent disease transmission):

-- The vast majority of Catholics and of priests see no intrinsic evil in contraception. Indeed, immediately after the publication of Humanae Vitae, the official Catholic pastoral letters of national bishops conferences in Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States made it clear that these were instances when the conscience of a Catholic prevails against the papal prohibition. It was argued that a responsible use of sexuality might require that a couple, even though respecting the pope's teaching, might conclude that the need to limit births and the need to preserve the sexual life of a marriage might prompt a couple, in conscience to choose contraception as the lesser of the evils. Catholic theologians went further and considered instances where contraception was not the lesser of two evils but a value in its own right, provided that it fostered sexual maturity and responsibility.

Lozano Cardinal Barragan of Mexico has previously stated that condoms can sometimes be condoned, such as when a woman can't refuse her HIV-positive husband's sexual advances. (It was with this same rationale that the RCC had turned a blind eye to African nuns using birth control pills to prevent pregnancy by insurgent rebel military forces who would routinely rape them.) "We must do everything to combat AIDS," he said. "Certainly, the use of condoms could be the lesser evil. There is the particular situation when one spouse is affected by AIDS. They are obliged to protect their partners, who must be able to protect themselves."

When asked if he shared Cardinal Martini's views about condoms, Cardinal Lozano Barragan replied: "It is a very difficult and delicate subject which warrants prudence." He said he preferred not to comment on +Martini's remarks, as "to not anticipate the study."

The comments by +Martini, who noted that it is one thing to condone a lesser evil in such cases and quite another for the RC Church to publicly promote condom use, echo those of other prelates, including Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels. Two months ago His Eminence told a Belgian newspaper that an AIDS carrier who refused to use a condom was guilty of homicide. "If it permits the protection of life, a condom does not have only a sexual role," he said, according to a translation in La Repubblica yesterday. "If a man ill with AIDS obliges a woman to have sex, she must be able to insist on a condom, otherwise you add another sin - homicide."

-- Monsignor Jacques Suaudeau of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family wrote in L'Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, that "the use of prophylactics" in some circumstances, "is actually a lesser evil but it cannot be proposed as a model of humanization and development" (April 19, 2000)

-- On Feb. 12, 1996, the French Bishops Council declared that the use of condoms "can be understood in the case of people for whom sexual activity is an ingrained part of their life style and for whom [that activity] represents a serious risk; but it has to be firmly added that such a method does not promote mature sexuality." "Many competent doctors state that a viable condom is today the only means of prevention [of the virus] . In this respect, it is necessary... The condom becomes understandable for cases in which a person who already engages in sexual activity needs to avoid a serious risk, just as we insist that this is not a substitute for an adult sexual education". The bishops' statement went on to stress that marriage partners should strive for fidelity and that all Catholics should continue to avoid sex outside of marriage. The bishops' however felt a responsibility to address the condition of married and unmarried Catholics who feel that it is impossible for them to completely refrain from sexual relations.

-- The Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger, declared in 1989 that love and chastity were essential values in sexual maturity but that if a person is "HIV positive" and "cannot live in chastity" that such a person "should use the means that have been proposed" to prevent infection of others.

-- RC Bishop Eugenio Rixen of Goias, Brazil, publicly stated that the principle of the lesser of two evils makes the "use of condoms less serious, morally speaking, than getting infected or infecting other people with the AIDS virus" (June, 2000).

-- Cardinal George Cottier of Switzerland. a theologian to the late Pope John Paul II, has reportedly suggested condom use may be thought legitimate in areas racked by drug use and promiscuity.

The Roman Catholic ultramontane traditon teaches that all condom use is a sin, because it prevents the conception of life and supposedly promotes promiscuity. Cardinal Martini explained that the Vatican would have to agree on whether to put their traditional "moral methods of defence" - including sexual abstinence - in second place, thereby "risking the promotion of irresponsible behaviour".

The president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Msgr. Elio Sgreccia, responded to Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini's statements published Friday by the online Italian magazine “L’Espresso”: Regarding condom use, even in order to prevent the spread of AIDS, let us remember that scientifically it does not offer complete protection,” and therefore “the most effective method of prevention is in the correct use of sexuality, which consists of chastity and fidelity.”

His Reverence should recall that Cardinal Godfried Danneels once rebuked Cardinal Lopez Trujillo for his statements about condoms failing to protect against HIV: “It does not benefit a cardinal to deal with the virtue [scientific integrity] of a product.” Most health care professionals contend that it is irresponsible of the Vatican to dismiss or misrepresent scientific evidence that has been produced by leading international and scientific agencies, which clearly demonstrates that condoms, when used correctly and consistently, are highly effective at preventing HIV transmission.

Catholic organizations provide some 25% of AIDS care worldwide, making The Church Catholic the largest institution in the world providing direct AIDS care. Tragically, the same hierarchy that controls 100,000 hospitals and 200,000 other social service agencies worldwide bans both education about and the provision of condoms in their institutions. This intransigent and insular Vatican attitude undermines the vital ministry of many Catholics with its stubborn opposition to condom use. Here in New York, only 7.1% of nearly $350 million in funding went to Early Intervention Services, including HIV testing, risk reduction counseling and transmission prevention in 2004.

Meanwhile -- ahead at the front and regardless of any threatened repercussions -- this Catholic street priest will continue to dip into his care bag and dispense prophylactics and educational materials to all sex workers and most sufferers regardless of status or syndrome cause.

....On the other hand, those slated ultramontane (Vatican Catholic) "Lifesaver gifts" (unlike that other holey candy) are expected to be "specific to married couples" ONLY and intended especially for sero-discordant couples where only one partner is infected and risk of infection to the other is high. (A review from the US National Institutes for Health cites an 85% success rate in that regard. “Workshop summary: scientific evidence on condom effectiveness for sexually transmitted disease (STD) prevention,” July, 2001) Yet it is forgotten or ignored that most HIV-positive couples don't want to infect each other with a different or stronger strain of the virus. However, the inclusive ultrajectine (Old Roman Catholic) Church tradition has never placed any restrictive parameters or conditions on our all-encompassing love.

It's a dying shame that the big guys in Rome still don't get the point nor see the whole picture...

Artistic image by Maximillian Tong, age 16, a student at Saint Jude's Parochial Catholic School. (In Kenya this month, a 15-year-old HIV-positive boy, whose parents and grandparents died of AIDS, was hacked to death by his only surviving relative, who had forced the boy to live in a chicken coop. In 1998, South African AIDS activist Gugu Dlamini was stoned to death by neighbors.)