No decision yet on condoms, Vatican sources say

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

Six months after global headlines trumpeted a possible sea change in Vatican teaching on condoms – specifically, cautious acceptance of condoms in the context of a married couple where one partner has HIV/AIDS, and the intent is to prevent the spread of the disease – sources told NCR this week that the matter is still unresolved.

In April, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragàn, President of the Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care, told the Roman newspaper La Repubblica that his office had been asked to study the question by Pope Benedict XVI. Partly because Lozano had previously said that a woman could insist her HIV-positive husband use a condom as a means of “self-defense,” many took the study as a sign that the Vatican was on the brink of a major innovation.

In fact, however, Vatican sources said that the scope of the study carried out under Lozano’s supervision was fairly narrow. One primary aim was to survey current scientific opinion about the effectiveness of condoms as a means of AIDS prevention, especially in light of criticism from Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo of the Pontifical Council of the Family, who has argued that the HIV virus is small enough that it can pass through a condom’s latex. (Most famously, Lopez made this assertion in a 2003 interview with the BBC, arguing that even on a medical and scientific level, condoms are therefore illegitimate).

According to sources, the study carried out under Lozano’s aegis reached a different conclusion. The size of the HIV virus by itself, it found, is not the only relevant factor, since the virus normally requires small but significant quantities of blood or semen in order to be transferred to another person. (This is one of the reasons, for example, that HIV/AIDS does not spread by mosquito bites). In general terms, sources said, the study concludes that condoms can be effective in retarding the spread of the disease.

The study has been forwarded to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has responsibility for the moral and doctrinal evaluation of its results. To date, sources said, the CDF has not communicated any conclusion to the Council for Health Pastoral Care.

The study took roughly eight months to complete, and was conducted by a working group of experts and consultors coordinated by Lozano. Pope Benedict requested it after a flurry of conflicting comments on condom use from cardinals, including a January 2004 declaration from Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Belgium, who said: “It is a matter of prevention to protect oneself against a disease or against death. You cannot judge that morally to be on the same level as using a condom as method of birth-control.”

The question is a pressing one, in part because Lozano’s council is currently preparing a manual on the treatment of HIV/AIDS for Catholic health care workers. According to council statistics, 26.7 percent of centers around the world for the treatment and care of people with HIV/AIDS are operated by the Catholic Church, far outstripping the commitment of other NGOs and religious groups.

At present, the draft manual contains no language about the use of condoms in the context of marriage. It states only that the Catholic Church teaches that abstinence is the only reliable form of prevention. Sources said that some of the council’s consultors have suggested the manual take up the question of condoms for married couples where one partner is infected, arguing that this is a matter of respecting the fifth commandment (“do not kill”) as well as the sixth.

Such language, however, would require approval from the doctrinal congregation. Sources said that most of the work on the handbook is complete, and that it will go to doctrinal congregation for review before it is issued.

If there should be an eventual decision on the issue, sources said, one pastoral concern will be how to explain it in a way that does not come across as blanket approval of condoms, thereby undercutting church teaching on human sexuality as well as possibly promoting greater promiscuity.