All I know is what I read in the papers:
Catholic News
And there is this from the BBC/Bloomberg Networks
(Emphasis mine)
Vatican Says Condoms Don't Block HIV, BBC Reports (Update2)
Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The Roman Catholic Church has urged followers in developing countries not to use condoms to prevent the spread of HIV by telling them the contraceptives have holes that allow the virus to pass through, the BBC reported.
The church's assertion is made in a British Broadcasting Corp. documentary, ``Sex and the Holy City.'' It airs Sunday, four days before the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's papacy. The show questions the pope's teachings on sex and his influence on the developing world, including the church's ban on contraception, according to the BBC's Web site.
In the program, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, backs the church's stance. He says sperm cells, as well as the smaller virus cells that cause AIDS, ``can easily pass through the `net' that is formed by the condom,'' Steve Bradshaw, a reporter on the program, writes in today's U.K.-based Guardian newspaper.
The World Health Organization said an intact condom is impenetrable to the cells and that ``consistent and correct'' condom use cuts the risk of HIV infection by 90 percent, according to the program. The church's warning on condoms risks adding to a pandemic that has killed more than 20 million people, the organization told Bradshaw.
Catholic populations have declined in the developed world and increased in developing countries. Africa accounts for 12 percent of the total Catholic population of about 1 billion, double the percentage 25 years ago, according to the Catholic News Service.
`Laced With AIDS'
The church's position has forced an AIDS teaching center in Kenya to stop distributing condoms, with some priests saying the contraceptives ``are laced with HIV/AIDS,'' the center's director, Gordon Wambi, said in the documentary, according to Bradshaw. In another scene, a Catholic nun advised a choirmaster infected with HIV against using condoms because they couldn't stop the virus from infecting his wife, Bradshaw wrote.
The WHO, a United Nations agency, said women in particular suffer a loss of human rights when they are denied protection from HIV. ``Condoms need to be more widely accepted, available and used,'' according to the WHO Web site.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the region most affected by AIDS, the United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS said on its Web site. Last year, about 2.4 million people died of AIDS in the region, where 29.4 million people are infected with the virus, the agency said. More than a quarter of the adults in four African countries -- Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe -- are HIV-positive.
Catholic leaders in Africa today said they'll do more to fight the spread of the virus, while continuing to oppose the use of condoms, according to Agence France-Presse.
``Using condoms as a means of preventing AIDS can only lead to sexual promiscuity,'' Dominique Bulamatari, the archbishop of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was cited by AFP as saying in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, at the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar.
Last Updated: October 9, 2003 11:37 EDT
(Twelve per cent of a billion would be 120 million African Catholics.)
Joe(Continue to avert your eyes)Nation
