South African bishop calls on new pope to face 'crucifying' AIDS

Agence France Presse - April 20, 2005

Carole Landry

JOHANNESBURG, April 20 (AFP) - A South African bishop and leading advocate of scrapping the Catholic Church ban on condoms on Wednesday urged new Pope Benedict XVI to open a dialogue with those who have had the "crucifying experience" of the AIDS pandemic.

Catholic Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenberg said however that he expected the Church's door to be kept tightly shut to the prospect of allowing the use of condoms to protect lives from HIV and AIDS.

"I believe that under Pope Benedict XVI, there won't be an opening to consider the possibility of the use of condoms in the AIDS pandemic. There will be a closing of the ranks around that issue," said Dowling, who led a campaign in 2001 in South Africa to challenge the ban that was soundly defeated.

Dowling harshly criticised "technocrats" in the Vatican who are far removed from what he termed the "crucifying experience" of meeting and trying to help people dying from AIDS in southern Africa.

German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who was elected as pope on Tuesday spent 24 years in the Vatican as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the church's doctrinal watchdog.

"They haven't got the first-hand experience of massive shack settlements like where I live and work and face this tremendous challenge where young women are dying of AIDS in terror and fear and totally rejected, with a baby dying as well, and worrying about what will happen if she dies first..."

"And where she has been forced into becoming a sex worker simply because she has no other means of survival and no options and therefore cannot follow the Church's direction," said Dowling in a phone interview with AFP.

"I believe our official stance is totally irrelevant to such people," said Dowling, whose archdiocese covers the platinum-mining heartland of South Africa.

Africa is home to nearly two-thirds of the world's AIDS sufferers or 25 million people and the pandemic is particularly lethal in southern Africa, where infection rates are the highest in the world.

South Africa has one of the world's highest AIDS caseloads, with 5.3 million people, or an estimated one out of five adults living with HIV and AIDS, according to UN figures.

"If the new pope engages in a dialogue with those who have had the experience of tragedy on the ground and have raised this issue, perhaps, perhaps as a theologian he will see that it is possible to make out a case" for ending the ban on condoms, said Dowling, 61, who has been bishop of Rustenberg for close to 15 years.

Catholic Church doctrine dictates that condoms cannot be used to prevent the sexual transmission of the AIDS virus because they are contraceptives and interfere with procreation.

But Dowling had sought to lift the ban on condoms, arguing that the Church should challenge people to act responsibly by "not transmitting death".

Dowling said he would continue to advocate condom use to prevent the spread of AIDS, saying it was ultimately "an issue of conscience."

"I'm not going to follow the Church's stance on this," he said.

"In the end, I have to be faithful in the sense of being full of faith and faithful to the God of the poor and suffering and desperate and fearful and hopeless people that I encounter every day in the AIDS pandemic. Their lives are precious to me and precious to God and that's the only thing that concerns me."