It’s been almost a week now since the Pope told a reporter that condoms increase the number of AIDS cases. And yet the evidence is incontrovertible, the science sound, the facts are there. Condoms prevent the spread of infectious disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is explicit
Latex condoms, when used consistently and correctly, are highly effective in preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
So here we are. Africa, 25 million have died from AIDS. Catholic nuns working on the ground, are hoping the Pope will change his views. One Catholic nun said the Pope is condemning people to death.
The Pope, in his infallible wisdom, has chosen a path that will lead to more suffering, to more abuse, and more AIDS victims. His words will further alienate and victimize those who suffer domestic abuse, those who are coerced into sex, those who sell their bodies to get by.
A few years ago I met a woman in a Nairobi slum. She was dying from AIDS. Her 9 year old daughter couldn’t prostitute herself because she was too emaciated and underfed. This is the reality where poverty, hunger, and fear are conjoined, where the nexus meets with the daily horrors beyond our own making.
It transcends the ideology of an old man obsessed with his own faith, gilded in gold in a palace thousands of kilometers away, and rhetoric that if taken seriously would throw humanity back decades and centuries.
On the other side of the world in Brazil, another 9 year old girl was condemened. She was raped by her step-father and had she given birth to the set of twins developing in her tiny uterus, she would of died.
The twins were aborted and now the Vatican has excommunicated her mother. But the bastard who raped her was spared the Cardinal’s wrath. The child, tormented and abused both physically and psychologically has to suffer from this backward ideology supposedly based on compassion. It is both inhumane and unjust.
And yet on the ground, the Church has done amazing work to alleviate the suffering. It is unfortunate that men in power, disconnected and deaf to reason, should dare determine the fate of so many.
