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South African Bishop Calls for Catholic “Theology” of Condoms for AIDS

By Hilary White

CHICAGO, November 15, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - South African Bishop Kevin Dowling said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune Friday that the Catholic Church needs to develop a theology of condoms to answer the AIDS crisis. Dowling told the Tribune that the Church’s teaching on sexual abstinence was an outmoded, “ivory tower” approach to the AIDS epidemic. He called on the Church to develop a theology that would allow contraception based on “human dignity and justice and human rights instead of just on an ethic of sexuality.”

Since 2001, when he first made public his views on condoms at a United Nations meeting on AIDS, Dowling, the head of the tiny impoverished Catholic diocese of Rustenburg South Africa, has been making headlines around the world by his opposition to Church teaching on sexual morality.

He told the Tribune that he has “no problem” with the Church’s teaching on abstinence and fidelity within marriage, but appears to have no intention of actively endorsing it for his own flock. In areas like his, flooded with itinerant workers and a huge prostitution problem, he said, “the only solution we have at the moment is condoms.”

In the Rustenburg diocese, instead of attempting to stop the exploitation of women forced into prostitution, Dowling’s Church-run health clinics focus on handing out condoms. He says that many men do not like to use a condom when buying the services of a prostitute and so Dowling is hoping his clinics can provide the women with an insertable microbiocidal gel that will not turn off potential clients.

After apartheid the Church brought 700 farm labourers to live on mission land, now called “Freedom Park,” while awaiting permanent resettlement. This Church-created camp became a magnet for prostitutes – women unable to make a living any other way – and a breeding ground for disease. The diocese responded with health clinics and a system of visiting homecare nurses but the AIDS rate skyrocketed along with a host of other sexually transmitted diseases.

Dowling’s promotion of condoms and denials of Catholic sexual teaching has made him popular with Jesuits at Boston College who invited him to speak. Shortly after his UN speech, he told a packed Boston College auditorium that the Church’s promotion of the sanctity of marriage and sexual self-control was a “death-dealing code.”

The condom solution, which is touted by nearly all international aid organizations including many of those funded by the Catholic Church, has done much to entrench the very pandemic it was meant to stop. Aid workers report that the continent has for years been awash in condoms and condom propaganda campaigns. Nevertheless, AIDS now infects close to 30 million in sub-Saharan Africa and kills 600 a day in South Africa alone.

Ironically, Dowling has a reputation as a fierce critic of government AIDS policies that he correctly points out have done nothing to stop the spread of the disease. The very statistics he quotes of death rates and the ineffectiveness of international AIDS prevention programmes make nonsense of his own thesis that condoms are the only solution. His ambition to have the Catholic Church adopt a “theology” of condoms would be a propaganda dream come true to the same NGO’s whose policies he denounces as ineffectual.

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