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AIDS statements at odds with Mission - Online Catholics (www.onlinecatholics.com.au)

An independent Australian e journal - September 1, 2004 (Issue 15)

A Melbourne-based Catholic AIDS agency has expressed concerns over the invitation by Catholic Mission to Uganda's Emmanuel Wamala, Archbishop of Kampala, as the keynote speaker at the launch of Mission Week in September.

Brian Haill, president of the The Australian AIDS Fund Incorporated (a non-profit AIDS care charity), told Online Catholics that the attitude of Cardinal Wamala was most unwelcome in this part of the world, especially with Australia's neighbour - Papua New Guinea - poised to suffer an African-style HIV/AIDS devastation.

In June this year, the Cardinal told the BBC Panorama programme that a woman who had chosen to sleep unprotected with her AIDS infected husband had made the right moral choice. "If it is wrong to use the condom, then she has made the right choice." Even if it costs her her life? "Yes," replies the Cardinal. The BBC reported that the woman believed herself to be HIV positive at the time of the interview. 43% of Ugandans are Catholics.

Brian Haill said that the Cardinal's position stood against Catholic Mission's vision of 'life for all'. "The partnership that Catholic Mission seeks to embrace with our Papua New Guinea neighbour is beautifully encapsulated in its mi bilong yu - yu bilong mi slogan, but that's at odds with the attitude of Cardinal Wamala in responding to the plight of people seeking to live with HIV/AIDS. It suggests a preference for some to share a shroud in death rather than a bedsheet in life."

Catholic bishops are themselves at odds on the question of the use of condoms. The Archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, said in January this year: 'Someone who is infected with the HIV virus, and decides to have sex with an uninfected person, has to protect his partner by using a condom." Thus if that person is promiscous, the Archbishop argued, the act of putting on a condom may be a positive moral act.

Emmanuel Wamala, Archbishop of Kampala

Brian Haill said the Catholic hierarchy had an obligation to make its position clear and simple to Australian Catholics in regard to the use of condoms to especially protect uninfected partners in marriage. The bishops also needed to publicly distance itself from the stance of Cardinal Wamala, Mr Haill said.

Catholic health and aid agencies in Africa say that AIDS can only be dealt with by attacking its roots in war, poverty and the sexual abuse of women. And they point to the cruelty of Africans being deprived of access to anti-retroviral therapy, which, in the west, has meant AIDS is no longer seen as a certain killer. Provide such treatment, they say, and you break the cycle of stigma and despair which often lies behind the promiscuity and abusive behaviour that cause AIDS to proliferate.

Worldwide, women's infection rates continue to spiral. Women now constitute 50% of infected people in the Caribbean, 55% in Middle East and North Africa region, and 58% in Sub-Saharan Africa (UNAIDS, 2002). In Africa, 68% of all young persons infected are female.

HIV/AIDS is one of the most complex challenges facing the world, because it poses an unprecedented threat to human welfare. Because HIV/AIDS is spread primarily through sexual contact, it is also driven by the unequal power relations between the sexes.

Brian Haill notes that now is the time to avoid an AIDS epidemic in the South Pacific, where PNG is thought to be at greatest risk of an African-style pandemic. "As a Catholic AIDS agency ourselves, one that's worked in hand with Australia's most senior Catholic leader, Cardinal Pell, we condemn the Ugandan Cardinal's attitude without reservation, and we express our real and compassionate concern for the safety and well-being of his people."