It was the women who got to him, he said. It was because of the women that he just couldn't go on as he had.Kevin Dowling, the Roman Catholic bishop of the diocese of Rustenberg, confided this unrepentantly.
"My passion is for the women," he said. "I'm in that corner."
There are so many women here with stories of pain. Dowling heard them, and he did what he knew was the right thing: distributed condoms.
It could have cost him his job and the community that has become his life.
It hasn't - not yet.
But he won't keep quiet, no matter how closely Rome watches, and so that risk is ever present.
Freedom Park is a vast, sun-baked sprawl of 5,000 shacks made of salvaged scraps of tin propped up cheek by jowl.
It has no electricity, no water and the streets turn to impenetrable ooze in the rain. It was given its optimistic name with the end of apartheid in 1994, but freedom has in many ways proved elusive.
This is just one of a half-dozen squatter camps that are home to 100,000 people near South Africa's border with Botswana.
They sit, literally, in the shadow of platinum mines, dwarfed by the shaft towers and the great heaps of dull gray tailings.
The mines rely on migrant labor, drawing men from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa's Eastern Cape. The men come for contracts of a year or two, and leave their families at home.
They don't earn much, but in a country of 45 percent unemployment, they make reasonable wages, enough to buy drinks in the hopping tavern and enough to buy female company when they get lonely.
In the wake of the miners come the women, fleeing what they see as dead-end lives in rural villages. Only a handful of them can get jobs at the mine.
But they have children to feed, and elderly parents; they need clothes, and money to rent one of the scrap-heap shacks. "The only way to eat is boyfriends," explained Thembi Maboyana, 38.
She came here as a girl of 15. "Today one, tomorrow another one."
It's the ideal environment for the spread of HIV, this vast web of people with overlapping relationships. Surveys have found that nearly half of the women here test positive for HIV.
Not long after Kevin Dowling, 63, was made bishop of this diocese 16 years ago, he started making trips out to the camps. In one dim shack after another, he heard the same sorts of stories.
He found pregnant women in the last hours of their lives lying on the damp, dirt floors; their babies would be born dead or die after a week or two.
The diocese began its response in 1996 with a small clinic in a shipping container - they called it Tapologo, "the place of rest."
Over the years, it has grown to include a school, a day care, a skills-training center, a clinic that provides life-saving drugs to people with AIDS, and a hospice for those who wait too long and can't be saved.
Teams of outreach workers such as Maboyana visit the sick, counsel new patients and urge people to protect themselves from the virus. How? "They must use condoms."
And that is how the bishop wound up in the opposite corner from his church.
The Vatican forbids the use of condoms in any circumstance; it says the sole way to protect oneself from AIDS is abstinence and fidelity in marriage.
Dowling says that doctrine has no relevance in Freedom Park.
"Abstinence before marriage and faithfulness in a marriage is beyond the realm of possibility here," he said. "The issue is to protect life. That must be our fundamental goal."
At the United Nations' special session on HIV-AIDS in 2001, a reporter for a Catholic news service asked Dowling what position the bishops' conference in southern Africa took on condoms.
He replied that the bishops did not yet have a position. The reporter pressed, asking for his personal belief. It was a moment of truth: "I could have obfuscated. But I told him what I believed. And that started the whole thing."
The papal nuncio soon informed him that his views were unacceptable and in conflict with church teaching. There were two more rebukes from the nuncio. They merely redoubled his conviction.
Dowling said he has had "a personal groundswell of support," messages from many ethicists and theologians, clergy and lay, who are also wrestling with this issue.
He is known, in southern Africa, as "the AIDS bishop," the man who has said clearly that the pandemic, and fighting it, ought to be the focus of the church here; there are many who admire his stand, and other priests and nuns who quietly give out condoms across the region.
In Freedom Park, no one thinks too much about the incongruity of a Catholic bishop advocating condom use. "He helps us to save people," Maboyana said simply.
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