Pope Benedict XVI has said that condom use can be justified in some cases to help stop the spread of AIDS, the Vatican’s first exception to a long-held policy banning contraceptives. The pope made the statement in interviews on a host of contentious issues with a German journalist, part of an unusual effort to address some of the harshest criticisms of his turbulent papacy.
The pope’s statement on condoms was extremely limited: he did not approve their use or suggest that the Roman Catholic Church was beginning to back away from its prohibition of birth control. In fact, the one example he cited as a possibly appropriate use was by male prostitutes.
Still, the statement was something of a milestone for the church and a significant change for Benedict, who faced intense criticism last year when, en route to AIDS-plagued Africa, he said condom use did not help prevent the spread of AIDS, only abstinence and fidelity did.
The interviews are to be published this week in a book, and excerpts were posted online by the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, on Saturday afternoon.
This leaked excerpt from the interview-book being released Monday has already flamed out of control, and the Vatican press room has issued a (hopefully) clarifying statement though I don’t know where it can be found in English, yet. The coverage here by ‘Hell’s Bible’ attempts a tone of caution yet also manages to imply that some change is afoot that could alter Catholic moral teaching – which the NYT has no time for – but that’s probably not the case.
The over-eager headlines make me wonder if Pope Benedict’s statement about a ‘first step’ in reference to developing moral awareness may have been misapprehended by lazy journalists and liberals as suggesting a first step in formulating a new approach to birth control techniques – it’s hard to imagine how else many of the headlines could have been coined. He opines that if a male prostitute with HIV chose to use a condom to prevent infecting another man, that might indicate the awakening of moral awareness in a person who is enslaved by immoral behavior – and such awakening is not a bad thing since it could be a first step, toward personal conviction of sin and seeking to be freed from same. Of course, in this book the Pope also reportedly reminds readers that his private opinions may be wrong. This Pope is stunningly intelligent as anyone who has read him will know, and here he trained his intelligence on the question of when use of a condom might fit the criterion of ‘self-giving’, as opposed to selfish, and identified one possible such use. And of course he then went on to explain with crystal clarity how the selfish use of sex enslaves individuals rather than freeing them and degrades the culture to everyone’s detriment. It’s to be hoped that part of the response will start to appear in media coverage soon.
The best comment on this that I have seen so far is by an Anglican, my friend John Hunwicke, Vicar of St. Thomas the Martyr, Oxford:
http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com/
22 November 2010
…. BUT ….: the Pope and the condoms
I’m not in the habit of attacking the Sovereign Pontiff. Moreover, I don’t usually criticise his advisers and assistants, because so often his critics attack them simply as a craven and cowardly way attacking the pope himself but doing it by proxy. For similar reasons, I haven’t even ever attacked his Press and PR people.
But … as a humble and simple pastor, I really would prefer that items which are going to hit the headlines were not sprung on us late on Saturday, so that we’re short of time in getting things straight ready for enquirers after Sunday Mass. As with this condoms business.
Having contemplated the BBC translation of the German texts, I see what the Holy Father’s words mean. He is saying that if a rent-boy has unprotected sex, he is committing two sins: the mortal sin of homosexual genital intercourse; and the mortal sin of risking communicating a lethal infection. If, however, he uses a condom, while he is still committing the first of those mortal sins, he has to a degree excluded the second. By so doing he has, as we might say, taken a step in the right direction. But he has still committed a mortal sin and is still, objectively speaking, not in a state of grace. There is a sense in which it is not as bad to commit one sin as it is to commit two; but the commission of one mortal sin still means that one is objectively in that state of alienation from God which we Christians call Not Being In a State of Grace.
Our enemies, of course, do not understand (and have no interest in understanding) about Being In a State of Grace. Secularists are, even when they hold Oxford professorships, a generally dim lot … dim because of a bigoted determination not to understand. They just want to ask blunt and unnuanced questions about “Is it All Right to use condoms?”. Within this toddler-level mode of moral discourse, our Holy Father’s simple statement of the moderately obvious is bound to seem to them like a “change in his implacable opposition to the use of condoms”. So we have to listen to these dreary half-wits condescending to a rather abler mind than theirs by saying that “the pope has at least learned a little from experience”. Thank God, he has done nothing of the sort.
Behind all this there is the determination of secularists to spread, by hook or by crook, fornication, adultery, and most other sexual disorders (not at the moment paedophilia, of course, because that is at the moment a handy stick with which to belabour the Church). They bleat incessantly about the plight of AIDS victims in Africa, but only a fool would believe that these well-heeled and malevolent chatterers lose a moment’s sleep worrying about such problems. Often sexually incontinent themselves, their relentless desire is to remake humankind in their own corrupt image. The Devil has blinded these intellectual giants to the fact, obvious to any simpleton reading the papers, that the sexual licence which they so successfully promoted in the second half of the twentieth century has led to an explosion of lethal bodily ailments such that even a classical utilitarian in the dear simplistic old John Stuart Mill tradition would be able to discern their immorality in promoting the vices which are so dear to them and so deadly to the multitudes whom they are successful in corrupting.
This business may have several outcomes. The lying classes may be successful in their attempt to create an impression that the Catholic Church is now gradually “seeing sense” on condoms, and thus to reinforce those who have been deceived by the Spirit of the Age into their wrongdoing. On the other hand, it is so obvious that what the pope has said has a nil bearing on questions of morality of contraception and of homosexuality that they may soon return to pointing this out and attacking him on all their old familiar grounds. Given Screwtape’s skill in getting the best of two contradictory worlds, they may very well go for both these mutually exclusive conclusions simultaneously.
Perhaps some of the Pope’s ‘friends’ (with ‘friends’ like his, who needs enemies?) will say that he has expressed himself in a way that lays him open to being misunderstood. But think about it. He has very carefully done exactly the opposite. Had he taken, for his exemplum, a heterosexual couple one of whom was infected with AIDS, he would have indeed left himself wide open to the superficially plausible accusation of a U-turn opening the door to the liceity of contraception within marriage. By using the exemplum of a rent boy, he has made this impossible. Nobody could seriously think that, overnight, a pope had so far moved from the Church’s previous moral teaching as now to uphold the liceity of homosexual intercourse and of prostitution … simultaneously.
Nobody, that is, except journalists verging on imbecillity or mired in habitual mendacity.
And today, convinced the bottom is deeper yet, they keep on digging:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/world/europe/23pope.html?hpw
Note the (repeated) use of “furiously” in the NYT article cited. A scurrilous piece of writing.
#1, a good analysis, but I don’t share your hopes!