Bishop in South Africa targets AIDS
They say statistics can be misleading, but you can't understand Bishop Kevin Dowling's decision to pick a fight with Vatican theology without a few statistics on HIV and AIDS from his South African homeland: more than 5 million infected, one-ninth of the country's population; 600 dying a day from the blight; a million children orphaned.
"Thirteen-year-olds are having to care for their siblings because their entire extended family network has died," said Dowling, leader of the Diocese of Rustenburg. These numbers persuaded him four years ago to suggest the improbable. The Vatican, he said, should soften its opposition to artificial contraception and sanction the use of condoms to slow the spread of the disease.
Comments by Catholic officials like Dowling, who spoke recently at Boston College, touched off a debate about the Vatican's policies in this area. In the process, Catholics and non-Catholics alike got a taste of the precise theological reasoning of Catholic tradition.
Dowling's stance earned a stinging dissent from the South African bishops conference. Condemning the condom as "an immoral and misguided weapon" in the war on AIDS, Dowling's fellow bishops warned of undermining the church's teachings on sexual morality and sending the wrong message. Yet even they endorsed an exception: If one person in a married couple became HIV-positive, the bishops agreed, they could use a condom.
In 2000, the same year Dowling spoke his mind, a Vatican official endorsed the same position in an article in, of all places, the Holy See's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.
While Dowling agrees with those who note that condoms are not 100 percent effective, he argues that "proper, consistent use" has been shown to significantly curtail infection rates.
In a phone interview, Dowling spoke with quiet rage about the suffering that led him to take his stand. That position is in large measure a function of place. The Pretoria-born prelate's diocese encompasses an area dotted with platinum mines, symbols of wealth around which, he said, "appalling squatters' camps" have arisen. The refugees filling those camps are often fleeing desperate poverty in other areas, and many are single women and mothers, Dowling said.
"Because they are illegal, they can't get grants from government and, in many cases, are forced into prostitution to survive. Their lives are of infinite worth; they are precious. The church should proclaim an ethic not merely of sexuality but of justice," he said.
"Abstinence before marriage and faithfulness to a single partner within a stable marriage -- obviously, those are key to good living [and] to avoid infection. However, the church ministers in the real world. Not everybody follows the value-based calls that go out from the church. In that scenario, the church should give people [all] the options, one of which is to use a condom, not as a contraceptive, but to prevent transmission of a death-dealing virus."
Dowling also makes an academic argument, honed, he said, with the help of theologians at places like Boston College.
"We can go to Humanae Vitae" -- the 1968 papal encyclical condemning artificial contraception -- "paragraph 19, where the use of contraceptives is allowed in terms of controlling menstrual bleeding," he said. "The pill there is not being used as a contraceptive but to heal a medical condition."
Condoms play a similar medical role in curbing the spread of AIDS, he says. The church prohibits the condom as contraception, but when used to protect against AIDS, "it's not being used as a contraceptive. I believe our moral theology principles -- of double effect, of the lesser of two evils or option for the greater good -- allow that interpretation to be followed."
In South Africa, the virus is transmitted overwhelmingly by heterosexual activity. Asked if the church's teaching that homosexual acts are sinful could be an impediment to its own AIDS ministry, he said, "The basic principle is there to be at least discussed. People end up in relationships for a variety of reasons. Their journey in life takes them to decisions about sexuality for many reasons. I believe the church should be fundamentally experienced by people as a revelation of the compassionate, nonjudging God that gives people space to go through a range of experiences in the quest for basic human dignity."
His talk to fellow Catholics at Boston College was intended to spur their activism in making sure that developed nations spend money on the crisis -- and to avoid the assumption some make that many Africans lack the education to follow the complicated self-medicating regimen involved in AIDS treatment.
"It's an insult to our people to tell them [they] are not capable of doing it. They can be given professional supervision," he said.
His dissent from his church is respectful. But the anniversary this month of another tragedy, the Rwandan genocide, is a reminder that the church can make mistakes, he says, for many Rwandans were Catholic, and priests and sisters have been tried for murder.
"Where can the blame, if we use that word blame, be laid in terms of the church's role and its mission in that society? Did we have a wrong understanding of what it meant to be church?"
Rich Barlow can be reached at rbarlow.81@alum. dartmouth.org.
