The Catholic Church Should Openly Support Condom Use and Contraception

Dear readers,
The Catholic Church has done a lot of immeasurable good things in Africa and elsewhere in the world but I still cannot understand why they cannot openly support the use of condoms to reduce Sexually Transmitted Diseases(STDs), and the use of contraception methods. The church has played a crucial role in educating; treating and bringing hope to a lot of Africans. It has quietly worked against evil systems, such as South Africa's apartheid and African dictatorships, as was the case, for instance, when one cardinal was used to support Yoweri Museveni's NRA rebels against Obote and Iddil Amin regimes in Uganda. Pope John Paul II also worked against communism and strongly opposed the war in Iraq, calling it a defeat for humanity which could not be morally or legally justified.

Nonetheless, recently, Pope Benedict XVI seems to have done a simple but not a 'sharp' u-turn on use of condoms when he said that people should use them which were a bit better than his April, 2009 message on his trip in Africa when he said that the use of condoms worsens the HIV problem. Benedict was born in 1927 and he has seen how the world has been changing since. So we expect him to see a lot of things differently though we expect him to review the abstinence message too. The church has been preaching abstinence outside married life and faithfulness within it and probably it would be effective if it was followed, but the truth is that people don't do so.

There's a lot of disinformation on the internet about regarding the safety of condoms. I suspect that the Catholic Church or religious leaders have something to do with it. The main problem with condoms is that they may break, or fall off when using them. I just don't see how an HIV virus would get through these pores when water doesn't. It's physically impossible. Unless the condom is damaged, the risk to HIV is very low.

Therefore, the Vatican and other religious groups' claims about permeable condoms are wrong. The World Health Organisation has already advised people to disregard messages from the church about this issue. The message of “abstinence” and “high-risk partners” should be preached alongside the use of condoms. There are some people who cannot abstain from knocking on certain 'HIV addresses' even if they are not landlords or tenants. They may just go there just to drop 'letters' or 'leaflets' or ' just delivering take-aways', and we need to find a way to protect them. So postmen, ambulance people, take-away people and marketers all need to be protected from the dogs in the houses.

Several organisations including Lancet, a UK Medical journal, have been criticising the church over their condom message and I think the criticism has started bearing some fruits going by the pope's recent message. We just hope that the rest of the church takes this message seriously, after all, condoms have already been proven as effective, in most African countries and beyond a doubt that they help in reducing the spread of HIV-AIDS and other STDs.

The Church's prohibition of contraception is also wrong since it does not seem to have any Biblical foundation, apart from the story of Onan spilling his seed on the ground, which is a special case. It seems more likely to have come from Aristotle, the source of much bad doctrine. The Pope has continually forced his own views on how women may control their own fertility but I think it is wrong.

The pope's U-turn in just a year's time is a confirmation that merely because one is famous (or wealthy) doesn't make one intellectually or morally superior to the rest of humanity. In reality, most of the so called famous people have a very limited understanding about how the rest of the world works, and are more interested in feeding their own fragile egos than examining the consequences of their actions. Many of them access no information, and base opinions solely on what is fashionably correct. They aren't reviewing abstracts in the journals looking for relevant articles, reading up on epidemiological studies, or picking up a calculator to crunch some numbers to do a basic sanity check before publicly uttering inanities like some statements that have come to be associated with the Catholic Church over the years. Most of the time, they are merely regurgitating the same message they have heard over and over again, from the usual drones. So people following these leaders should use common sense before they take everything they say on board. We all love our religions but we also accept that very few people confess to their sins in public. So we need to find a way of protecting most especially the silent sinners because they may turn out to be useful some day.

Abbey Kibirige Semuwemba
United Kingdom