Condoms, Catholics and AIDS in Africa

While Europe is kicking up a fuss this week about sexual abuse from priests in the past, a more serious scandal within the Catholic Church continues – the Vatican’s no-condom policy.

The policy may do little harm in Western countries with easy access to welfare, healthcare and education. But it’s a different story in African countries ravaged by poverty, AIDS and HIV – and where people are increasingly taking up Catholicism.

Opinions are split on the issue. The Church’s good work with programs fighting AIDS in Africa is often overshadowed by what some say is blindness to the detrimental effects its policy has on the disease’s spread.

The continent has been hit hard by AIDS. The United Nations and World Health Organisation estimate sub-Saharan Africa has 22 million people infected with the virus – over two-thirds of the global total.

Nine out of ten child HIV sufferers are Africans and there are 11.4 million orphans from the disease.

Here’s where it becomes controversial. The Church opposes sex outside of marriage as well as the use of contraception.

But using condoms to prevent sexually transmitted diseases is not specifically addressed by the Church’s doctrine – although statements have indicated it’s not acceptable.

Pope Benedict XVI made his anti-condom stance clear shortly after becoming pontiff in 2005, when he addressed bishops from South Africa, Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia and Lesotho at the Vatican in Rome.

He said AIDS won’t be cured with condoms but by the traditional teachings of the Church including sexual abstinence and fidelity. He reiterated the remarks during a visit to Africa in 2009, outraging health agencies trying to halt the spread of the disease.

Many in the Church believe condoms increase a person’s promiscuity and that the despair behind this behavior including poverty and limited access to AIDS treatment needs to be addressed first.

The former Archbishop of Nairobi, Raphael Ndingi Mwana a'Nzeki said condoms contribute to the spread of AIDS, while some African priests have even staged public burnings of the devices.

Supporters of the Church’s policy say condoms may work in Western countries but don’t in Africa. Instead they point to successful campaigns for abstention and faithfulness that have decreased new cases of AIDS in countries like Uganda.

Catholic priest Gisuseppe Caramazza spent 17 years at the front line of the problem in Kenya and wrote an article for the UK Guardian in 2009.

He agreed that condoms encourage people, especially youth, to be sexually careless, and promoting responsible sex lives is the only way to combat the problem.

He said this is lost on people who have not been to Africa and ignorant Western journalists unwittingly help multinational companies who thrive on high numbers of AIDS patients.

His view was in response to freelance journalist Tanya Gold’s article claiming the policy is a holocaust by the Church as condoms save people’s lives. She claims the policy shows religious notions are more important to the Church than African lives.

The religion is fast-growing in the region and Rebecca Hodes of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa says the Church’s influence could be better used to promote information about condoms and wider access to them.

Some priests and senior clergymen within the Church agree. They support condoms for AIDS prevention and say the reason they’re used determines whether it’s good or bad. The use of condoms for married couples when one has the disease is also being debated.

Condoms4Life is an ongoing worldwide public campaign sponsored by Catholics for Choice in countries including Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, Kenya, Chile and Zimbabwe to raise awareness about the effects of the ban on condoms.

Indeed, many Catholics are upset by the policy. One deputy-editor of a Catholic newspaper said that by refusing to deal with the human realities in Africa, the Church is contradicting itself as a teacher of Christianity.

Whatever the case may be, the issue remains ambiguous and unresolved. And with ambiguity amounting to death and suffering, the method that best helps to minimise the spread of AIDS in Africa needs to be confirmed once and for all.

By Carolyn Thomas