Benny’s Bungle Over A Condom Conundrum

I promise I don’t enjoy posting over this stuff, but I feel like I have to (and I also posted over here).

This story tells us the following…

Pope Benedict XVI said on his way to Africa Tuesday that condoms were not the answer in the continent's fight against HIV, his first explicit statement on an issue that has divided even clergy working with AIDS patients.

…

"You can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms," the pope told reporters aboard the Alitalia plane headed to Yaounde. "On the contrary, it increases the problem."

The pope said that a responsible and moral attitude toward sex would help fight the disease.

Oh God (not trying to be funny) – is this stuff ever going to stop with this man?

Yes, I’m extremely aware of Church doctrine on this issue, but to align himself with the propaganda that condom use actually encourages AIDS by promoting “a false sense of security” is a willful ignorance that almost defies description.

And get a load of this explanation…

Describing the current crisis as the consequence of "a deficit of ethics in economic structures," the pope said: "It is here that the church can make a contribution."

“A deficit of ethics in economic structures”?

Your Holiness, you are no longer presiding as a chair in dogmatic theology at the University of Tübingen. Your “flock,” if you will, is the REAL WORLD.

In response, this story tells us the following…

Father Valeriano Paitoni, working in São Paulo, Brazil, summarized this perspective: “AIDS is a world epidemic, a public-health problem that must be confronted with scientific advances and methods that have proven effective,” he said. “Rejecting condom use is to oppose the fight for life.”

Bishop Kevin Dowling of South Africa has also been imploring the Vatican to view condom use as curtailing the transmission of death rather than precluding the transmission of life. In South Africa, 5.3 million people are infected with HIV and 25 percent of all pregnant women test positive for the virus.

Bishop Dowling prays that the Holy Spirit will intervene to change minds in Rome. He believes Pope Benedict XVI’s view on the use of condoms would change, “if his visits to poor countries were done in such a way that he could sit in a shack and see a young mother dying of AIDS with her baby.”

Amen to that.