MADRID, Jan 21 (AFP) - Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls sees condoms as a tool which does not resolve the issue of AIDS transmission and which as such does not interest him, Catalan daily La Vanguardia on Friday quoting him as saying.
"This tool hardly interests me," La Vanguardia quoted Navarro Valls, a Spaniard, as saying as he entered an increasingly fraught debate on the use of condoms in predominantly Roman Catholic Spain.
"To see in this tool the unique solution is not to deal with the problem at its core," added Navarro Valls, who said he preferred to look at defining what is human love based, for the Church, on male-female relations and the underlying goal of procreation.
Earlier in the week, the spokesman for Spain's Conference of Catholic Bishops, Juan Antonio Martinez Camino, raised eyebrows by saying condoms could be used as part of the global effort to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Spanish Church officials and the Vatican swiftly set the record straight, saying the Roman Catholic Church remained opposed to the use of condoms and that there had been no change in that doctrine.
For Navarro Valls, a member of the influential ultra-conservative Opus Dei movement the issue is one of sexuality.
"I do not censure the discussion which has opened up in Spain in the past few days but the point at issue is related to anthropology, in the sense of sexuality. I insist, this is an anthropological issue more than a moral one," Navarro Valls said.
"If you say you have a headache I will not be satisfied giving you a painkiller. I will seek out the origin of this headache," the pope's spokesman went on.
Navarro Valls denied personally telephoning the Spanish Church to recant Bishop Martinez Camino's declarations made Tuesday.
Martinez Camino on Thursday told Spanish radio station Cope, which is close to the Church, that he had had two telephone conversations with Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo designed to "jointly" develop a response to the former's "extremist interpretations."
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