AIDS advocate Brian Haill says Cardinal Pell should resign over his remarks in the press that self-control matters but condoms do not in the fight against AIDS.
Advocacy that does not promote the safety of a spouse within marriage from the prospect of HIV infection is an "appalling" wrong, says the head of an Australian AIDS agency in a letter to Cardinal Pell last week.
Brian Haill, the head of The Australian AIDS Fund Inc, a Catholic charitable organisation in Melbourne, wrote to Cardinal Pell following the latter's comments in the Catholic Weekly (Dec 12) last year, in which the Sydney Archbishop writes that self control is part of the answer to AIDS but that condoms are not.
"The preservation and the sanctity of human life is paramount," the letter says. "For a Catholic Bishop to argue that a wife may not protect herself with a condom when having sex with her insistent husband who has AIDS is, in my view, an embarrassment," writes Haill in his letter, dated 27 January. "The Cardinal should resign."
Many individual bishops and some bishops' conferences elsewhere in the world have announced that condoms ought to become part of a range of strategies to deal with the pandemic. See last week's report in Issue 36 .
In a related development, Papua New Guinea has been told it has more than 11,000 of its children infected with HIV. Another 9,400 have been orphaned by the disease. The total population is approximately 5.3 million.
The Port Moresby Post-Courier broke the news which was contained in a shock survey finding by the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF
The Australian Aids Fund has just begun funding a 3 day-a-week feeding program in the Port Moresby General Hospital, which doesn't have the money to feed its patients.
The UNICEF survey has also revealed that the situation of PNG's orphans and infected children is critical and will worsen in the years ahead. Almost two-thirds of the population is Christian. Of these, more than 700,000 are Catholic.
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