VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI has opened the door on the once-taboo subject of condoms as a way to fight HIV, saying male prostitutes who use condoms might be beginning to act responsibly. It is a stunning comment for a pontiff who has blamed condoms for making the AIDS crisis worse.
The pope made the comments in a book-length interview with a German journalist, “Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times,” which will be released Tuesday. The Vatican newspaper ran excerpts Saturday.
Church teaching has long opposed condoms because they are a form of artificial contraception, although it has never released an explicit policy about condoms and HIV. The Vatican has been harshly criticized for its opposition.
Benedict said that condoms are not a moral solution. But he said in some cases, they could be justified “in the intention of reducing the risk of infection.”
He used as an example male prostitutes, for whom contraception is not an issue, as opposed to married couples where one spouse is infected. The Vatican has come under pressure from even some church officials in Africa to condone condom use for monogamous married couples to protect the uninfected spouse from getting infected.
Benedict drew the wrath of the United Nations, European governments and AIDS activists when he told reporters en route to Africa in 2009 that the AIDS problem on the continent couldn’t be resolved by distributing condoms.
“On the contrary, it increases the problem,” he said then.
Journalist Peter Seewald, who interviewed Benedict over six days this summer, raised the Africa condom comments and asked Benedict whether it wasn’t “madness” for the Vatican to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms.
“There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility,” Benedict said.
But he stressed that it wasn’t the way to deal with the evil of HIV. He reiterated the church’s position that abstinence and marital fidelity are the only sure ways to prevent HIV.
Related news
24 join ranks of cardinals
ROME — Pope Benedict XVI elevated 24 new cardinals in a festive ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, bestowing quadrangular red hats on the new members of a group that will one day elect his successor.
Two Americans were among the elected. Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., is seen as a bridge-builder. Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, a former archbishop of St. Louis, is now the prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, a Vatican court, and is known for his outspoken criticism of President Barack Obama and of Catholics who support abortion rights.
Dressed in heavy golden vestments, Benedict called on the new cardinals to devote themselves entirely to humble service to the church. Its force, he said, is “not the logic of supremacy, of power according to human criteria, but the logic of bowing down to wash feet, the logic of service, the logic of the cross which is at the base of every exercise of power.” The New York Times
