Applause for Cardinal Godfried Danneels

As the founder and current President of the Melbourne-based Catholic AIDS-care agency, The Australian AIDS Fund Incorporated, I write to publicly applaud the reported statements of Belgium's Cardinal Godfried Danneels that "the use of a condom might be a 'lesser evil' when it could preserve someone from a deadly disease like AIDS." When will the universal church understand that there's been a paradigm shift in the role of the contraceptive sheath over the past 20 years? Once, it was viewed as a device "to block life", but now, with the advent of HIV, it's a crucial means of blocking the transmission of death.

The Catholic hierarchy in Australia needs to follow this European lead as a matter of urgency or else its language and sentiments regarding violence against women will be seen as hollow comment indeed. There is a host of supporting material carried on the www.aids.net.au/us-catholic.htm page of our www.aids.net.au website.

Catholic World News (and subsequently CathNews in Australia 13/3) reports that in an interview with a Belgian journal, Cardinal Danneels said that if an HIV-positive man wishes to have relations with his wife, "she should make him use a condom". Otherwise, he said, the couple might be "adding another sin: homicide." The cardinal reasoned: "A condom, when it is used for the protection of life, is not only a matter in the sexual domain."

Cardinal Danneels made a similar statement in a television interview in January 2004. Other influential prelates have adopted similar positions, suggesting that condom use could be justified within marriage to prevent transmission of AIDS. In January 2005, Cardinal Georges Cottier, the theologian to the papal household, told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera that condom use "could be considered legitimate" under those restricted circumstances. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is reportedly studying the question of whether condoms might be used within marriage to prevent disease.

We believe it needs to address this as a matter of the utmost urgency. It’s a matter of life and death because HIV infects by the minute, every minute, regardless of the rank or indolence of the world's bystanders.

Brian Haill, President, The Australian AIDS Fund Incorporated, Frankston, Victoria.