The pope: New thoughts on condoms

It was just a tiny, tentative step forward, said Stephen Bates in the London Guardian, but the Catholic Church may finally be entering “the real world.” Pope Benedict XVI, in a newly released interview, makes the startling admission that condoms can play a role in halting the spread of AIDS. While still maintaining that the use of condoms for birth control is a sin, Benedict says, and I quote, “there may be justified individual cases, for example when a male prostitute uses a condom.” The Vatican quickly backpedaled, insisting that the pope’s remarks constituted no official new teaching, but clearly, a closed door has been opened. This “will come as a relief to many Catholics in the West,” said Catherine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet, in the London Independent. The priest sex-abuse scandals cost the Church “a great deal of credibility on sexual morality.” A new attitude of realism and compassion on condoms and AIDS could help repair that “damaged reputation.”

“No, the pope did not change Catholic teaching on condoms,” said George Weigel in National Review Online. That teaching—like that of the broader “Catholic ethic of sexual love”—is “a fundamental moral truth” that “has not changed and it will not change because it cannot be changed.” In making a fine moral distinction, Benedict merely said that an HIV-positive male prostitute could make “a first step” toward morality by using a condom, because it would show his concern for another human being. Nor, obviously, was the pope expressing a new tolerance for prostitution or homosexuality, said Dr. Janet Smith in CatholicWorldReport.com. In effect, he was saying that it would be preferable for a bank robber to use an unloaded gun when committing his crime, so as to reduce the risk of harm to others.

But that pragmatic calculus is itself a major shift, said Barney Zwartz in the Australian Age. When the pope toured Africa last year, he specifically denounced the use of condoms to fight AIDS, arguing that by encouraging immorality, condoms actually spread the disease. His new attitude seems to be that “since people are being immoral anyway, let’s limit the damage.” This is a “welcome and necessary shift,” said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. Religion is, and must always be, focused on promoting “ideals of human behavior.” But to be a force for maximum good, religion must simultaneously strive to be “realistic about human nature.”

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