Nearly a year removed from Pope Benedict's
comments on condoms, the Vatican held an HIV prevention conference in
which the head of the U.N. Aids agency said that the pope has opened the
door to greater dialogue with his groundbreaking comments.
Even as Vatican officials stressed
abstinence and marital fidelity as the best prevention Dr. Michel
Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, was invited to speak to the
conference on preventing HIV and caring for HIV-positive people.
This is a significant event in and of
itself, given that the Vatican usually only invites like-minded
outsiders to its conferences and UNAIDS has not been like-minded on this
issue at all.
UNAIDS holds that condoms are an "integral
and essential" part of HIV prevention programs, which it says should
also include education about delaying the start of sexual activity,
limiting sexual partners and marital fidelity.
The Catholic Church opposes condom use as part of its overall opposition to artificial contraception.
The Church does, however, play a crucial role in caring for HIV-positive people, particularly in Africa
where some two-thirds of the world's 22 million infected people live.
It runs hospitals and hospices, orphanages and clinics and has played a
critical role in helping to de-stigmatize those with the virus and
stress the need for changes in sexual behavior to stop its spread.
But the Church has long been accused of contributing to the AIDS crisis because of its opposition to condoms.
That was why Pope Benedict XVI
made headlines last year when he said in the book "Light of the World"
that a male prostitute who intends to use a condom might be taking a
first step toward greater responsibility because he is looking out for
the welfare of his partner.
"This is very important," Sidibe told the
conference. "This has helped me to understand his position better and
has opened up a new space for dialogue."
At the same time, however, the Vatican
officials speaking at the conference either glossed over or made no
reference whatsoever to Benedict's condom remarks — evidence of a
certain "one step forward, two steps back" mentality that often
characterizes developments in the Catholic Church.
Monsignor Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's
envoy to the Geneva-based U.N. agencies, cited several other Benedict
quotes from the book, but not the condom comments. Monsignor Zygmunt
Zimowski, head of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, which
hosted the meeting, didn't mention Benedict at all, citing instead Pope John Paul II
about the "crisis of values" behind the AIDS crisis.
Monsignor Jacques
Suaudeau of the Vatican's bioethics advisory board briefly showed a
slide with the remarks but didn't mention them.
The discrepancy reflects to some degree the
way in which the pope's remarks were received. Progressives saw his
comments as a justification of condom use in a break with church
teaching; conservatives insisted he wasn't altering doctrine and that
the opposition to condoms remained.
After three attempts at
clarification, the Vatican eventually issued a definitive ruling saying
the pope hadn't changed church teaching.
Nevertheless, the impression left at least
within the AIDS community was that he had made an opening — and Sidibe
latched onto that Saturday.
Sidibe said previously the AIDS community
and Catholic Church were "talking over" one another and often worked in
opposition to one another in dealing with the AIDS crisis.
But he said
Benedict's words had opened a new possibility for working together,
particularly in agitating for greater access to anti-retroviral
treatments for the world's poorest patients.
"Yes, there are areas where we disagree and
we must continue to listen, to reflect and to talk together about them.
But there are many more areas where we share common cause," Sidibe said.
Increasing access to treatment has become an
even greater rallying cry following the recently published results of a
nine-nation study showing that HIV-positive patients who received early
treatment were 96 percent less likely to spread the virus to their
uninfected partners.
Sidibe called the research a "game-changer"
in the fight against AIDS, particularly for couples where one person is
HIV-positive.
Zimowski concurred, saying it even gives
hope to such couples who want to have children — in other words, sex for
procreation in keeping with church teaching.
That said, all 1,763 couples in the National Institutes of Health
study, where one partner had HIV and the other didn't, were urged to
use condoms and the study's authors stressed that condoms remain crucial
for protection.
The Vatican's emphasis on the need for
changes in sexual activity has been boosted by studies showing that at
least in Africa, prevention programs focusing on condom promotion aren't
working and that what works is male circumcision and reducing the
number of sexual partners.
Yet Dr. Edward Green, former director of the
AIDS research project at Harvard University, said there is little
financial support for programs that advocate partner reduction,
particularly among Western donors who uniformly insist on condom
distribution as part of prevention efforts.
Green says he belongs to no particular church and bases his findings on empirical evidence, not morality.