I knew the Pope was powerful, but I didn’t know he was “superhero” powerful. Apparently, he is because London’s The Telegraph says in an editorial that “The Pope should slow the spread of AIDS.” Wow, singlehandedly slowing down the spread of a deadly pandemic! That’s the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.
Seriously, you know the drill by now. The Church teaches that the use of contraceptives, including condoms, is a violation of the sanctity of the marital act, and that premarital sex is a violation of chastity. Thus, while the rest of the world touts “safe sex” using condoms (which are themselves porous to small bacteria, if not to sperm), the Church says that abstinence is the only safe alternative, both logically and morally.
For years the Church has been attacked for her teaching with some claiming incredibly that while thousands of people will ignore the Church’s teaching on chastity, they slavishly adhere to her teaching on the use of condoms, thus putting themselves at risk of AIDS. This is patent nonsense. Still, it doesn’t prevent the advocates of sexual license and anti-Catholics from attacking the Church, just like this Telegraph editorial.
A quarter of the world’s Aids treatment centres are run by the Roman Catholic Church, whose ban on condoms as a form of contraception has until now ruled out their use to block the transmission of HIV. (To the fury of the World Health Organisation, some senior Vatican officials are spreading the message that condoms are useless because the virus passes through the rubber, a claim dismissed as nonsense by most experts.)
Gee, I’m sorry that the WHO is infuriated, but it isn’t just Vatican officials who are questioning the safety of condoms. There are plenty of good old-fashioned medical scientists who do so too, and many of them aren’t Catholic and aren’t basing their theories on Catholic moral teaching.
When cardinals publicly question
Technorati Tags:abstinence, AIDS, cardinal, Catholic, condoms, contraception, doctrine, media bias
