The painful ravages of AIDS (see above) in recent decades have, in places, been mind-boggling. With 15 percent to upwards of 25 percent of the adult population infected by HIV/AIDS, the epidemic has killed adults, left children orphaned and crippled the economy in rural villages and urban areas across a number of sub-Saharan countries in Africa. Parts of India are similarly stricken. Even in America the rates of infection in impoverished black communities are stunningly high.
Yet for decades, the Catholic Church and its conservative leaders in the Vatican have adhered defiantly to the strict standard that banned the use of condoms in any circumstance, even to prevent the rampant deadly disease of AIDS. Until this week.
On Tuesday, Pope Benedict XVI stunningly changed positions and charted a compromise course on the sanctity of life issue as it relates to contraception. He candidly acknowledged, at last, that the need to prevent diseases like AIDS may take precedence over the Catholic Church’s rejection of any use of a contraceptive device.
He asserted, the Vatican’s spokesperson said, that with people infected with HIV, the use of condoms could represent “the first step of responsibility, of taking into consideration the risk to the life of the person with whom there are relations.”
This a welcome step from the Pontiff toward the physical and medical reality that haunts too much of the world, particularly the underdeveloped areas where the Catholic Church holds uniquely powerful influence.
The pope’s ideological veer came after the publication Tuesday of a new book, “Light of the World,” written by a German journalist following conversations with the pope on a wide range of issues.
Still, his words propelled a firestorm of debate among angry Catholics on one side, and joyous Catholics on the other. Pope Benedict also made it clear, however, that he was not changing the church’s deeply rooted doctrine rejecting contraceptives in normal circumstances relating to procreation.
The church fundamentally opposes contraception in the belief that every sexual act should be open to procreation. What the pope has just acknowledged is that prevention of a deadly disease raises a concern in which the use of condoms may be permissible, his spokesperson said.
That distinction has been advocated for some time by more liberal Catholics, particularly in Africa, a continent which the Church sees as an area of emerging congregational growth, and in which the epidemic of AIDS has been exceedingly deadly.
Conservative critics of the pope’s compromise may continue to hold his new position as an indefensible intrusion against the previously inviolable doctrine against the use of contraception. Yet in fact, many Catholics, particularly in America and other developed countries, quite readily use contraception. Doctrine aside, the steep decline in Catholic families with large numbers of children is proof enough of that.
Conforming belief with actual practices among the laity, however, comes slowly with the Catholic Church. The ideal of a celibate, unmarried priesthood – never mind decades of rampant sexual abuses by too many priests – and strictures against female priests remain barriers to the Church’s growth and to the acknowledged equality of women. Allowing condoms to prevent deadly disease is apparently a far easier reach, but it is certainly well justified.