Church, get real about condoms

Here's a question for condom condemners: What do you do when sticking to your beliefs means that half your nation's population may die from HIV/AIDS? (And that's only in the next 2 decades.)

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[Transcript of an interview on the ABC radio current affairs program 'PM' broadcast from Sydney, Australia.]
PM - Wednesday, 15 March, 2006 18:41:44
Reporter: Dhana Quinn

MARK COLVIN: An Australian Catholic AIDS charity is calling on the Church to "get real" about the use of condoms to fight the HIV epidemic in the Pacific.

The issue has again flared after a Papua New Guinea Government minister asked for church groups to put aside their religious biases and support condom use in the country.

The Catholic Church in PNG has responded by saying the minister is asking the church to abandon its beliefs.

Dhana Quinn reports.

DHANA QUINN: Brian Haill is the President of the Australian AIDS Fund, a Catholic not-for-profit charity based in Melbourne, and he's tired of the Catholic Church's failure to change its stand on condoms.

BRIAN HAILL: Condoms do have a critical role in HIV prevention. It is true that the church has a hang-up over condoms, but that goes back 20 years or more before HIV was ever heard of. The church then railed against condoms as a birth control device – it blocked life. But today, with AIDS amongst us, the condom blocks death, and that's what the archbishops and the cardinals and the curates need to grasp and understand quickly.

DHANA QUINN: For 20 years Mr Haill's organisation has been involved in AIDS care work, including work in Papua New Guinea, where the issue of condom use has again been raised.

A PNG Government minister has asked church groups to put aside their religious and moral biases and support condom use. The President of the Catholic Bishops Conference in PNG, Bishop Francesco Sarego, has responded in a statement, saying the minister is asking churches to ignore their beliefs, in effect to act against their consciences.

The Bishop says churches cannot be expected to become agents for dispensing condoms.
Mr Haill.

BRIAN HAILL: The Bishop does wrong to intimidate his flock in this way. The reality is that the HIV infection rate in PNG has reached such a runaway situation that there is the real reality that half a million Papua New Guineans could be infected by 2025.

Figures from the Australian Government's aid agency AusAID show PNG has the highest incidence of HIV and AIDS in the Pacific region, and is the fourth country in the Asia Pacific region. AusAID funds a number of programs in PNG, but it was a condom promotion campaign which outraged some church leaders last year. Given the PNG Government also wants to promote condoms, is it possible for the Catholic Church to work in harmony with other agencies in the
region?

The Catholic welfare group Caritas Australia, which has worked in PNG for years, believes it is.

Its Chief Executive, Jack de Groot.

JACK DE GROOT: It's not difficult at all when the Church in Papua New Guinea and the churches of Papua New Guinea provide 40 per cent of health care services throughout the nation for us to be a very significant player in a comprehensive strategy to prevent HIV infection.

DHANA QUINN: He says the Catholic Church works closely with the Government, and each has its own areas of expertise to offer.

JACK DE GROOT: The Church's education program in PNG will be to educate about all means of prevention, including condoms. But it will not actually get into the business of promotion and distribution of condoms. It will play to its other strengths of the issues of the protection of family life values, the issues of fidelity, the protection of rights of women, and the addressing of violence against women. It will do those things that it does best and it will allow the Government to do the things it does best.

DHANA QUINN: Annmaree O'Keeffe is Australia's special representative on HIV/ AIDS at AusAID. She says the Catholic groups play a vital role in PNG and, regardless of the rhetoric, things are not as black and white on the ground.

ANNMAREE O'KEEFFE: There are certain parts of the Catholic Church that do distribute condoms and do it quite openly, and there are other parts that feel that this contradicts some of the requirements coming out of certain quarters, particularly the Vatican. But those that do distribute the condoms believe that it is very much in keeping with the 10 commandments to do so.

MARK COLVIN: Annmaree O'Keeffe, Australia's special representative on HIV/ AIDS, with Dhana Quinn.

Technorati: HIV/AIDS, Papua, Church