A False Choice | George Neumayr | Editorial | Catholic World Report | January 2011
The mischievous debate over condoms
In 1987, a committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops published The Many Faces of AIDS. The document adopted a mixed message on condom use, ostensibly upholding Church teaching against it while at the same time endorsing “educational efforts” that could “include accurate information about prophylactic devices or other practices proposed by some medical experts as potential means of preventing AIDS.”
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and now Pope Benedict XVI, opposed that document. In a pointed letter, he warned “against engaging in compromises which may even give the impression of trying to condone practices which are immoral, for example, technical instructions in the use of prophylactic devices.”
He drew the US bishops’ attention to an article in L’Osservatore Romano that condemned condom use without equivocation: “I quote, ‘To seek a solution to the problem of infection by promoting the use of prophylactics would be to embark on a way not only insufficiently reliable from the technical point of view, but also and above all unacceptable from the moral aspect. Such a proposal for ‘safe’ or at least ‘safer’ sex—as they say—ignores the real cause of the problem, namely, the permissiveness which, in the area of sex as in that related to other abuses, corrodes the moral fiber of the people.”
During his 2007 visit to the US, he sounded this warning again, lamenting as “particularly disturbing…the reduction of the precious and delicate area of education in sexuality to management of ‘risk,’ bereft of any reference to the beauty of conjugal love.”
And then, most recently in the interview-book Light of the World, he repeated that condom use is not a “moral solution.”
Yet the Catholic left claims confidently that the Church’s position on condom use has “changed.” Dissenters continue to point to the passage from Light of the World in which Benedict offers a narrow and nuanced observation about an intention behind (but not the act of) condom use and speculates that the flicker of consideration for another person’s safety contained within that intention might in some cases grow into a greater sense of morality: “[The Church] 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.”
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This is not the first time that The Bishops have failed to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate behavior while making it appear as if they are in communion with the teaching of The Catholic Church. I am not surprised that Cardinal Wuerl was not capable of clarifying The Catholic Church's teaching regarding homosexuality and thus dadt. If The Bishops wanted to make a clear statement on Church policy regarding homosexuality, they would not have allowed the erroneous document, "Always Our Children", created and supported by a cast of dissenting characters, to be published and placed on their website. The Catholic Church recognizes that homosexuality is a disordered sexual inclination and that because it is a disordered sexual inclination, men and women who struggle with a homosexual sexual inclination may not be fully personally responsible for their disorder. This does not change the fact that The Church teaches that out of respect for the inherent Dignity of the human person, found within our complementary nature as male and female endowed to us from God, those sexual acts and sexual relationships, including all homosexual sexual acts and homosexual sexual relationships, that demean and objectify the Dignity of the human person, must never be condoned. It is out of Love and respect for the Dignity of the human person, found within our inherent complementary nature as male and female, created in The Image of God, that The Catholic Church teaches we must desire the development of healthy and Holy relationships, grounded in authentic Love.
Posted by: Nancy | Monday, January 10, 2011 at 12:45 PM