Will the new pope get religion on rubbers--and redeem the Church?
One week after Pope John Paul II, 84, died on April 2, a gushy NBC prime-time special, Pope John Paul II,
1920–2005, proclaimed, “If there was a Ronald Reagan of Catholicism,
this was the person.” In AIDS terms, the parallel was all too apt. Like
the Gipper, JP failed to meet the terrible test of stopping HIV from
becoming the greatest public-heath disaster in modern times. Still,
most world media performed an instant canonization. The hagiographers
didn’t mind the Pope’s staunch refusal to sanction condom use
throughout his 26-year reign. During his tenure, AIDS killed
nearly 30 million, ravaging the third-world nations he so pointedly
embraced. Now, as ultraconservative German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
78, morphs into Pope Benedict XVI, AIDS activists are hoping to witness
a miracle of sorts. For the first time since the epidemic hit, they can
dream that the new pope will—against all evidence of his frequently
self-proclaimed “fundamentalism” —poke holes in the Vatican’s
anti-condom dogma, which holds that no action before, during or after
sex can be used to prevent procreation.
“Catholic activists are
hoping a dialogue on condoms will open up,” says Jeff Stone, a longtime
member of Dignity USA, a gay Catholic activist group. As too the
scholarly Ratzinger, who presided at John Paul’s funeral after
faithfully serving for more than two decades as his doctrinal watchdog
and political lightning rod, Stone takes a pragmatic view. “Given
the damage AIDS is wreaking, the bishops who’ve spoken out in favor of
reevaluating the church’s position on condoms and the church’s growth
in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the church will be virtually forced
to reconsider its stance.”
The charismatic John Paul never
publicly addressed criticism of his anti-condom orthodoxy, choosing
instead to promote compassion for PWAs in frequent photo ops during
which he hugged children with HIV and pronounced, “God loves those of
you who are suffering from AIDS.” The only coherent prevention policy
he advanced was one of abstinence. “John Paul II emphasized the virtue
of restraint—that sexuality should be between a man and a woman in the
institution of marriage,” says William Donohue, president of the
conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. On this
score, JP was simply following the official Catholic playbook: the 1968
encyclical Humanae Vitae, which trounces birth control.
As
recently as October 2003, in a bizarrely inept attempt to counter the
growing practice of condom acceptance by developing-world priests
alarmed at the spread of the disease, Latin American Cardinal Alfonso
Lopez Trujillo, president of the pontifical council for the family,
went so far as to suggest in a BBC documentary that “the AIDS virus is
roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon—the spermatozoon can
easily pass through the ‘net’ that is formed by the condom.” Such
distortion of science has crept into President Bush’s own
abstinence-only prevention policies here and abroad.
While few
critics openly place responsibility for such clumsy subterfuges at the
feet of the deeply learned and politically wily Ratzinger, as chief
church theorist, he has slammed homosexuality as “an objective
disorder” and condoms as unreliable and morally unacceptable. Still,
the hope for a policy change is more than latex-thin. The Catholic Fund
for Overseas Development (CAFOD), an international human-rights group
based in England, as well as Western cardinals such as Belgium’s
Godfried Danneels, have begun to argue that condoms might be
permissible if wearing them prevents an even greater evil: the
transmission of a lethal virus and, ultimately, the manslaughter of a
sexual partner. CAFOD, now operating in 64 countries, says it ignores
“oversimplistic” solutions (implicitly, the Vatican’s). While it does
not yet distribute condoms, it acknowledges that they are a necessary
component in combating AIDS. In January 2004, Danneels went so far as
to say, “If a person infected with HIV has decided not to respect
abstinence, then he has to protect his partner, and he can do that by
using a condom.” In previous years, such blasphemy might have led
Ratzinger to silence Danneels, as he did many other men of the cloth
who strayed from church doctrine.
Conservative and liberal
Catholic activists are in general agreement that in the face of the
global AIDS epidemic, the church risks losing all moral authority—and
even greater numbers of its fast-dwindling members and donors, at least
in the wealthy West—if it persists in its anti-condom creed. Dignity’s
Jeff Stone says that if Benedict doesn’t deliver, “HIVers need to
follow the highest authority—their own consciences—and make their own
judgments after considering the church’s teachings.” Many already have.
Catholic HIV positive blogger Andrew Sullivan withdrew from communion a
year and a half ago. “I find the church’s opposition to the use of
condoms for HIV prevention deeply immoral. I couldn’t take it any
longer. But I still consider myself a Catholic—in exile.”
