Pope asks for study on condom use

THE Vatican is preparing a document about condom use by those with AIDS at Pope Benedict XVI’s request.

“Soon the Vatican will issue a document about the use of condoms by persons who have grave diseases, starting with AIDS,” Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, who is in charge of the Vatican’s healthcare ministry, told yesterday’s La Repubblica newspaper.

“My department is carefully studying it, along with scientists and theologians entrusted with drawing up a document about the subject that will soon be made known,” the Mexican cardinal said.

“It is Benedict XVI who asked us for a study on this particular aspect of using a condom by those afflicted with AIDS and by those with infectious diseases.”

The Vatican opposes the use of condoms as part of its overall teaching against contraception and advocates sexual abstinence as the best way to combat the spread of the HIV virus, which causes AIDS.

Last week, retired Milan Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, a one-time papal contender, said in comments published in Italian newsweekly L’Espresso that condoms were the “lesser evil” in combating the spread of AIDS.

Asked if he shared Cardinal Martini’s idea about condoms, Cardinal Lozano Baragan said: “It is a very difficult and delicate subject which warrants prudence.” He said he preferred not to comment on his fellow cardinal’s remarks, so as “to not anticipate the study”.

The comments by Cardinal Martini, who noted that it is one thing to condone a lesser evil in such cases, and quite another for the church to publicly promote condom use, echoed those of other churchmen.

Cardinal Lozano Barragan has also said in past comments that condoms could sometimes be condoned, such as when a woman cannot refuse her HIV-positive husband’s sexual advances.

In the La Repubblica interview, Cardinal Baragan was asked about Cardinal Martini’s suggestion that unmarried women could carry frozen embryos to term if the alternative is letting them die in the freezers of fertility clinics.

Church teaching holds that all procreation must take place within marriage; the Vatican also opposes many assisted fertility procedures.

“It is life which must prevail, and we need legislative frameworks which would allow evaluation case by case,” the Mexican cardinal said about the frozen embryos.

As for abandoned children, the cardinal said “it would be always ideal to give them a father and a mother”.

He added that “even singles” could adopt, “but with much prudence, and ruling out homosexuals” as adoptive parents.