Pope Benedict has suggested that the use of condoms could be justified in some exceptional circumstances.
His comments came in a series of interviews given to a German
Catholic journalist, Peter Seewald, which are published in a question
and answer format in a book to be launched on Tuesday.
Here is an extract of the book - entitled Light of the World:
The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times - in which the Pope
refers to the use of condoms in preventing the spread of Aids:
Peter Seewald: On the occasion
of your trip to Africa in March 2009, the Vatican's policy on Aids once
again became the target of media criticism. Twenty-five percent of all
Aids victims around the world today are treated in Catholic facilities.
In some countries, such as Lesotho, for example, the statistic is 40
percent. In Africa you stated that the Church's traditional teaching has
proven to be the only sure way to stop the spread of HIV. Critics,
including critics from the Church's own ranks, object that it is madness
to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms.
Pope Benedict: The media coverage completely
ignored the rest of the trip to Africa on account of a single
statement. Someone had asked me why the Catholic Church adopts an
unrealistic and ineffective position on Aids. At that point, I really
felt that I was being provoked, because the Church does more than anyone
else. And I stand by that claim.
Because she is the only institution that assists people up
close and concretely, with prevention, education, help, counsel, and
accompaniment. And because she is second to none in treating so many
Aids victims, especially children with Aids.
I had the chance to visit one of these wards and to speak
with the patients. That was the real answer: The Church does more than
anyone else, because she does not speak from the tribunal of the
newspapers, but helps her brothers and sisters where they are actually
suffering.
In my remarks I was not making a general statement about the
condom issue, but merely said, and this is what caused such great
offense, that we cannot solve the problem by distributing condoms. Much
more needs to be done. We must stand close to the people, we must guide
and help them; and we must do this both before and after they contract
the disease.
As a matter of fact, you know, people can get condoms when
they want them anyway. But this just goes to show that condoms alone do
not resolve the question itself. More needs to happen. Meanwhile, the
secular realm itself has developed the so-called ABC Theory:
Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom, where the condom is understood only as a
last resort, when the other two points fail to work.
This means that the sheer fixation on the condom implies a
banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous
source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression
of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves.
This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a
part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive
value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man's
being.
There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as
perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first
step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of
responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not
everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it
is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection.
That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.
Peter Seewald: Are you saying, then, that the Catholic Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?
Pope Benedict: She of course does not regard
it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be
nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a
first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of
living sexuality.
SIC: BBC/UK