The Catholic church's Lazarus complex over HIV-Aids

It saddens me that Rome is prepared to help the victims of its no-condom rule, but not the healthy from becoming infected

So here we are again, talking past one another on the subject of condoms, Aids and Africa. Tanya Gold says the pope's got it all wrong. Giuseppe Caramazza defends the pontiff, under the headline "the condom is no cure for Aids in Africa".

Let's get some facts straight. Condoms prevent HIV. And if we prevent HIV, then we prevent Aids, without having to put millions into the bank accounts of pharmaceutical companies. Caramazza toes the papal line, implying that African countries with higher rates of condom use have higher rates of HIV, and that condoms therefore don't work in preventing HIV. Well, more people use insecticide-treated bed nets in west Africa than they do in Britain, and west Africa has far higher rates of malaria. Proof, by Caramazza's logic, that treated bed nets don't work as protection against malaria.

He also holds up the example of Uganda as a country that has promoted abstinence and seen HIV infections fall. I must correct him. Uganda aggressively promoted condoms as well as abstinence and fidelity from the early 1990s until the early 2000s. People began to wait on average a year longer before becoming sexually active. Once active, they were more faithful to their chosen partners, and used condoms much more frequently with the casual partners they did have.

All of this in combination did, indeed, cut the number of new infections. Then, around five years ago, Uganda started to receive vast slabs of money under the US government's Pepfar (President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief) programme, which was driven by rightwing Christians. A good proportion of the money was spent on the abstinence-only sex prevention programmes, which have failed so miserably in the United States. Shortly afterwards, the slow slide in new HIV infections that we had measured in rural areas over the previous decade stopped, and there are indications that new infections are actually rising again.

The Ugandan data has been so badly tortured by both promoters and opponents of condoms that it has confessed to just about anything asked of it, so it's not Caramazza's confused interpretation that upsets me. What I object to (as a Catholic, and one who has worked, like him, in Kenya) is the Catholic church's distorted approach to compassion, which his words shine a light upon. He rightly points out that "the church cares for the victims of Aids", that many of the organisations caring for those infected and their families are Christian. Half of all Aids projects in Africa are run by Catholics. I'm prepared to bet that almost all of them deal with "victims".
