World AIDS Day 2004 - Catholics clash on World AIDS Day - Online Catholics .com.au
Senior church figures figures have clashed over strategies to halt AIDS in Australia, as the Federal Government prepares to unveil its fifth National AIV/AIDS strategy. Over the past 20 years, 23,556 people in Australia have been infected by HIV and 6,363 have been killed by AIDS.
Brian Haill, President of the Australian AIDS Fund, Inc has issued a public challenge to Church Resources' CEO Fr Michael Kelly sj, to publicly repudiate the Church's position on condom use. Fr Kelly was appointed to the Federal Government's HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmissible Infections Subcommittee of his newly constituted Ministerial Advisory Committee on AIDS, Sexual Health and Hepatitis (MACASHH) by Tony Abbott earlier this year.
"Fr Kelly has the critical opportunity, the vital obligation now, to speak up on the validity of condom usage, most especially in those cases where a spouse or partner is HIV infected.
"Given that there is no official magisterial teaching by the church on condoms, we publicly challenge Fr Kelly through Online Catholics to make this position quite clear now, as his World AIDS Day contribution," Mr Haill said.
Mr Haill said that Fr Kelly's acceptance of that subcommittee position could only be regarded as his endorsement for condom usage given they're a must in the government's anti-AIDS battle. "It's time now for him to come out and say so," said Mr Haill.
However Fr Kelly told Online Catholics that it was culture, not condoms, which should occupy the minds of seeking a solution to AIDS.
"The Church opposes condom use in part because their use does not address the cause of the problem, a deadly virus transmitted through sexual contact.
"It is not an anti-sex argument to observe that our culture has been thoroughly over-sexualised largely for commercial gain.
"As a media worker, I am very aware of the way young men and women are exploited for sales of commodities and services. You don't have to be Mary Whitehouse to agree with that.
"Pope John Paul II has consistently warned western societies of the dangers of excessive capitalism. Turning young men and women into sex objects for advertising purposes communicates to all other young people something particular about what the wider society regards as their real value.
"It is easy and predictable for Mr Haill to attack the Church about its position on condom use. It is more difficult to address the cultural environment that persuades young men (in particular) to change their behaviours," Fr Kelly said.
Australia is the odd one out in AIDS terms. Elsewhere in the world, AIDS has become increasingly feminised. Women already now account for nearly half of the world's adult HIV infections and, under the age of 24, girls and young women account for almost two thirds of those living with HIV. However in Australia, most of the 12,000 people living with HIV infections are homosexual men. 77.6% of new diagnoses of HIV in 2001 were attributed to male-to-male sexual contact and a further 4.0% in male-to-male sexual contact with injecting drug use.
The Australian AIDS Fund was launched in the mid 1980's after Eve Van Grafhorst (pictured) became the first Australian child to be HIV-infected via a polluted blood transfusion - cruelly the last of the 11 such transfusions she needed to save her life as a premature baby.
Mr Haill said that Eve is a reminder that heterosexual women and girls need protecting now, and that condoms were an essential part of that protection. "Fr Kelly could offer a Catholic voice of reason and support for women and girls - wherever they struggle to live - with or without HIV," he said.
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