Abstinence before marriage for single people and faithfulness to one's spouse for married couples are "obviously the only fail-safe way" to avoid contracting AIDS, said a South African bishop.As the Catholic Church teaches, Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenburg, South Africa, said he promotes abstinence and marital faithfulness, especially with children and young adults, and runs educational and behavior modification programs to teach people to make proper choices in all areas of life, including sexuality.
But he said the reality in Africa is far from the ideal.
"We can promote those values, and they work pretty well in the context where a person has a security net," Bishop Dowling said. "Unfortunately, extreme poverty is driving particularly vulnerable young women to extreme positions. They are forced into transactional sex."
He has argued that in some limited instances, the use of condoms to prevent the transmission of AIDS is morally justifiable.
That view, which he first articulated in June 2001, has prompted strong criticism of him, most recently when he was in San Francisco to receive an honorary degree and address the undergraduate commencement May 22 at the University of San Francisco.
Bishop Dowling has worked in HIV and AIDS care and prevention since 1992. His diocese runs a clinic, school, day care facility, skills-training center and hospice facility to care for vast shanty communities that grew in the shadow of a local platinum mine.
In an interview with Catholic San Francisco, the archdiocesan newspaper, he said the South African economy is in shambles, and as a result many unemployed women wind up in the slums around the mine.
He said women come looking for jobs -- though many are illegal immigrants and cannot secure proper identification -- to earn money to feed themselves and their children, and many of them are compelled to take one of the only options open to them: prostitution.
"For me, that is a profound injustice," he said.
Bishop Dowling said men in the society, even some who are professed Catholics, completely disregard church teaching on abstinence before marriage and faithfulness afterward. He said miners either infect local women, or contract HIV from them and return home to infect their unsuspecting wives.
"In this context, to discuss sexuality and the use or not of condoms purely within the realm of personal moral choice is not exhibiting honesty and integrity in facing the fact that this is a far from ideal situation," Bishop Dowling said.
He said the church need not and should not distribute condoms, as they are readily available from the government. But, he said full, nonjudgmental education about the disease and methods of preventing its spread, including the use of condoms for those who engage in sexual activity, has saved and will save lives.
"The Catholic Church, after governments, is doing the most creative and wonderful work across the board in terms of health care, clinics, hospices, orphan care, in-patient units and so on," Bishop Dowling said. "All that gets lost, particularly in the media, because of the perceptions about the church's approach to condoms." +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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