A rethink on Aids

Seen through Western media eyes, the Catholic Church's main contribution to the battle against HIV-Aids in Africa and elsewhere has been its opposition to the use of condoms as a protection against infection. That perception was made worse by the way certain churchmen, most notably the late Cardinal López Trujillo, offered flawed scientific arguments in support of the condoms ban. The reality is rather different. The Catholic Church, through its agencies and particularly through its religious orders, is at the forefront of caring for the victims of Aids, including dependants. The Union of Superiors General of Men and Women Religious has just held a meeting in Rome to review progress, at which it heard that Church agencies of various kinds were responsible for a quarter of the total effort throughout the world. But awareness of this remarkable  record has been eclipsed by the controversy over condoms.

Cardinal López Trujillo, as head of the Vatican's Council for the Family, argued forcibly that particles of the Aids-causing virus were so small they could easily penetrate the material from which condoms were made. This turned the issue into one of effectiveness rather than morality, implying that more impermeable condoms would be acceptable. And given the overwhelming consensus among scientists that he was wrong, the argument gave the impression the Church was clutching at straws. The cardinal, who was a ferocious opponent of liberation theology when he was in Latin America, brought the same combative style to his defence of Catholic doctrine, or what he thought Catholic doctrine ought to be, when he went to the Vatican.

In any event, the López Trujillo line on condoms has been contested at the very top, with a number of prominent cardinals arguing that unprotected sex between husband and wife when one of them is infected is not about the transmission of life but the transmission of death. Others have suggested that the distribution of condoms to prostitutes, say, was justified as the lesser of two evils. In the West at least, there is also widespread dissent from the fundamental teaching of Humanae Vitae that contraception itself is wrong. Even within the context of Humanae Vitae there is scope for applying the principle of double effect, when the intention behind the use of a prophylactic is not contraception but the prevention of infection. The possibility of the Vatican reviewing some of these positions has increased with the death of Cardinal López Trujillo.

What complicates the argument is the fact that condoms are often advanced as an alternative to behavioural change. Church leaders in Africa are right to insist that changes in behaviour are necessary, both to combat the Aids epidemic and to reduce the sexual exploitation of women by their male partners. Liberal opinion in the West is not keen to criticise another culture's sexual permissiveness, partly because of its own record in this respect. So condoms are promoted as a response to Aids that leaves settled patterns of sexual behaviour unaltered. Given that the ability to make a woman pregnant is taken as a sign of virility, however, condoms alone are not likely to prove successful. But combined with behavioural and attitudinal changes, they can have an effect. The Church needs a new head of the Pontifical Council for the Family who starts from what the facts are and not from what he would like them to be.

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