VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican has invited AIDS experts from around the world to a two-day symposium on preventing HIV and caring for people with the virus, just months after the pope made international headlines with his comments about condoms and AIDS.
Organizers insist the meeting Friday and Saturday
won't call into question traditional church teaching opposing artificial
contraception. In the run-up to the conference, the Vatican's newspaper has run
a series of articles reinforcing the church's position that abstinence and
fidelity in marriage are the best ways to curb HIV.
Yet Pope Benedict XVI's comments last year about
condom use with prostitutes with HIV seem to have removed a certain Vatican
taboo that had all but ruled out public discussion of whether condoms were even
effective in reducing HIV transmission.
Some of the speakers at the conference organized by
the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers forcefully advocate condom use
to prevent HIV's spread: Among them is Dr. Michel Sidibe, executive director of
UNAIDS, the U.N. agency which maintains that condoms are an "integral and
essential" part of prevention programs, which the U.N. says should also
include education about delaying the start of sexual activity, limiting sexual
partners and marital fidelity.
In a book interview last November, Benedict said
condoms were never a moral solution to fighting AIDS. But he said someone, such
as a male prostitute, who uses a condom to prevent HIV transmission might be
showing a first sign of a more moral and responsible sexuality because he is
looking out for the welfare of another person.
The comments were significant. While there had
never been an official Vatican policy about condoms and HIV, some Vatican
officials had previously insisted that condoms not only don't help fight HIV
transmission but make it worse because they gave users a false sense of
security. Some claimed the HIV virus could easily pass through the condom's
latex barrier.
Benedict himself drew the wrath of UNAIDS and
several European countries when, en route to Africa in 2009, he told reporters
that the AIDS problem couldn't be resolved by distributing condoms. "On
the contrary, it increases the problem," he said then.
The comments and the Catholic Church's overall
opposition to condoms as contraception have drawn fierce criticism,
particularly in Africa where an estimated 22.4 million people are infected with
HIV, two-thirds of the global total.
Benedict's revised comments in the book "Light
of the World," however, drew near-universal praise even if interpretations
of what he meant differed wildly.
Was he justifying condom use in certain
circumstances in a major break with church doctrine? Progressive Catholics
argued he was. Conservative Catholics insisted he wasn't. The Vatican issued
three different clarifications before finally concluding his comments were in
full conformity with church doctrine.
Yet with the small opening Benedict made — it was
the first time a pope had implicitly acknowledged that condoms could actually
help fight the spread of HIV — the Vatican debate seems to have changed ever so
slightly.
The liberal group Catholics for Choice is urging
participants at the symposium to take advantage of the window created by
Benedict's remarks last year to promote condom use in comprehensive HIV
prevention programs and "resist" attempts by conservative Catholics
who have sought to narrow what the pope meant. The group plans to take out an
ad in Saturday's Corriere della Sera thanking Benedict "for acknowledging
that condoms save lives."
Yet Dr. Edward Green, the former director of the
AIDS prevention research project at Harvard University, says empirical evidence
is increasingly showing that condoms aren't the solution, at least in Africa
where heterosexual sex among multiple partners in regular, concurrent
relationships is largely to blame for HIV's spread. It's a different scenario
than in Thailand, for example, where high-risk sex workers have driven the
spread of the virus.
"I'm not anti-condom," Green said in an
interview ahead of his speech Saturday to the conference. "They should be
accessible, affordable, free. Just don't bet the house and farm on it."
What works in Africa, Green says, is male
circumcision and reducing the number of sexual partners — in other words,
changing the sexual behavior that fuels HIV's spread, a message the Vatican and
other faith-based groups have long preached.
"I've taken a lot of flack from my family
planning colleagues, many of whom saw me as a traitor and thought I'd undergone
a religious conversion," said Green, who professes to belong to no
particular church. He insists his conclusions are based on "empiricism
about what works and what I know about Africa."
Monsignor Kevin Dowling, bishop of Rustenburg,
South Africa, knows Africa too though he is not speaking at the conference.
Since 1997 he has run a community-based HIV program that provides home-care
nurses, anti-retroviral clinics, a hospice and program for orphans to cope with
the hundreds of thousands of HIV-positive people of the region. And he counsels
condom use.
The snapshot that he paints is chilling: The area is
home to large platinum mines that attract men from around the region to work
for months at a time away from their families, and women who come looking for
work. Desperately poor, the women are forced to engage in what Dowling calls
"survival sex" — to pay for food and shelter since there are no other
jobs.
"What am I to say to her? That the only 100
percent sure way of ensuring that you will not become infected is to abstain
from sex before marriage, and remain faithful to a single partner in a stable marriage
for the rest of your life?" Dowling said in an email. "Such 'choices'
are totally, but totally irrelevant to such people."
He says that years of sitting with women in their
shacks as they or their children die had led him to take the nuanced position
that "in certain circumstances, the use of a condom is allowable not as a
contraceptive but to prevent disease," he said. "We do not give out
condoms, but people are fully informed about prevention methods and helped to
make informed decisions about how they can protect themselves and, if they
themselves are HIV positive, how they can avoid infecting someone else."
Dowling says he has endured "much
trouble" for his views, but he says he believes it is fully in line with
church teaching since the condom isn't being used as a contraceptive but to
prevent disease.
Copyright
2011 The Associated Press.
