The Pope on condom use

It’s quite natural for Reproductive Health bill advocates to welcome Pope Benedict XVI’s stance on the use of condoms for exceptional cases, such as when a male prostitute has to use the prophylactic to avoid infecting other persons. In fact, although it would be like reaching for the moon, they would like a more radical position of allowing married couples to use the device.

The Pope’s remark has created no small tempest within the Catholic Church. The pro-lifers charge the media and RH advocates of misinterpreting or reading an unintended meaning into the Pope’s statement

I am not questioning the morality of male prostitutes. The Scriptures cite homosexuality as a sin. But it is difficult to cast a stone on these individuals. There are people who believe that HIV and AIDS victims have brought the disease upon themselves and rightfully should be punished. I feel heartened by articles citing the efforts of Catholic and other church organizations to help AIDS victims and their families.

A book about the Pope that still has to be released, The Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and The Signs of the Times, has put the issue inside a boiling cauldron. The book is a compilation of answers by the Pope to questions raised by German journalist Peter Seewald on a variety of subjects, among them the use of condoms to prevent AIDS.

Seewald reminds Pope Benedict about a statement he made in Southern Africa about the Church’s traditional teaching as “the only sure way to stop the spread of the disease.” This provoked critics, who said “it is madness to forbid a high risk population to use condoms.”

The journalist Peter Seewald asks, “In Africa you stated that the Church’s traditional teaching has proven to be the only sure way to stop the spread of HIV. Critics, including critics from the Church’s own ranks, object that it is madness to forbid a high risk population to use condoms.”

The Pope says his remark that “caused such great offense,” was “We cannot solve the problem by distributing condoms.”

He says — and this is where he is interpreted to have made a shift with regard to condom use: “There may be a basis in the case of some individuals as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one can do whatever one wants. But it is really the way to deal with the evil of HIV. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.”

Seewald asks, “Are you saying, then, that the Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?”

Pope Benedict: “She of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more humane way, of living sexuality.”

I’m convinced the Pope did not espouse the use of condoms as a contraceptive device, and the act of a male prostitute using the prophylactic in consideration of other persons’ health, is a recognition of his sense of responsibility — and not just his own protection from the HIV virus.

The condom is one of the contraceptives promoted by reproductive health advocates not merely to prevent the spread of HIV and consequently AIDS, but as a family planning device.

The AIDS scourge necessitates the use of un-natural measures in place of abstinence, the Church’s approved natural family planning method that is largely ineffective. The UNAIDS 2009 report says some 60 million people worldwide have been infected by AIDS; some 25 million have died. The sad thing is that children of HIV-infected parents are infected by the disease. The World Health Organization reports that around 14 million children were orphaned in South Africa alone since the epidemic.

AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency syndrome) is a disease of the human immune system caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The disease affects the immune system and leaves individuals susceptible to infections and tumors.

The virus is transmitted through anal, vaginal or oral sex with HIV-infected persons, blood transfusion, use of HIV-contaminated hypodermic needles, close association between an HIV-infected mother and her baby during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding, or exposure to one of body fluids such as blood, semen, vaginal fluid, preseminal fluid, and breast milk.

WHO regional director for the Western Pacific, Dr. Shin Young-soo, told the wire service AP, that he hoped the Pope’s statement “will soften resistance, particularly from the Catholic Church, to the use of condoms.” He also said unprotected sex has been the main cause of the AIDS epidemic in Asia where HIV has infected about 20 percent of sex workers and 30 percent of men having intercourse with other men.

He also said that 1.4 million people in the region have AIDS and HIV infections are rising, with about 150,000 new cases yearly, most of these caused by unprotected sex and the sharing of drug needles.

If the Pope’s statement has been misinterpreted, so has the message of the Reproductive Health bill that is being tackled heatedly in Congress now. First, the critics say the RH bill is in keeping with the US policy of population control to benefit the security of the United States. Second, the bill endorses abortion as a family planning method. The truth is the bill does not espouse abortion as it is prohibited by the Constitution. But it mandates hospital institutions to care for women suffering from complications from self-induced abortions.

Another charge that critics so ferociously hurl at the RH advocates is that contraceptive pills are abortifacients, as they kill the unborn children. This is preposterous. The pill prevents the union of the sperm and egg — so there is no killing of an unborn child in the mother’s womb. Why do the pro-lifers insist that the pill kills?

The RH bills in Congress, says Congressman Edcel C. Lagman, principal author of HB 96, stress that couples have access to information on family planning and responsible parenthood, and the different kinds of family planning methods. –Domini M. Torrevillas (The Philippine Star)