Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - July 8, 2001
Carmel Rickard

The proposal is likely to cause an uproar in the Catholic Church, which has been implacably opposed to the use of condoms, believing that they interfere with the creation of life.

But Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenburg, North West, who is investigating a possible new policy on combating HIV-Aids on behalf of his fellow SA bishops, is now proposing that the church's total ban on condoms be lifted.

If accepted at their meeting later this month, a document containing the policy bombshell will be published as an official pastoral statement on HIV-Aids by the bishops of Southern Africa.

Explaining his support for the document, now in the post to all the bishops for consideration before their July 24 meeting, Dowling said Aids was killing so many people that he felt he could not "duck the issue" of condoms.

Dowling's comments follow the recent UN Special Assembly debate on Aids at which Mozambique Prime Minister Pascoal Mocumbi explained that abstinence was not always a solution to the spread of Aids. He added that all parents should talk frankly about sex with their children, and "provide them with information, communication skills and, yes, condoms".

The draft to be considered by the bishops restates the traditional Catholic view that sex should take place only within marriage, but adds that condoms should be seen in the context that many people do not accept this value .

Dowling said the church should challenge such people to act responsibly by not infecting themselves and by "not transmitting death".

He said the statement would seek to give the "full picture", spelling out the failure rate of condoms and the fact that their use raised many sensitive cultural difficulties.

But he added that the Aids crisis posed "stark choices" for many people.

When a husband was infected and the couple took no steps to prevent the wife becoming infected as well, both could die, leaving their children orphaned. The "greater good" required that the mother "continue to live", Dowling argued.

He said he had become aware of the reality of HIV-Aids through his work with the people on platinum mines and informal settlements around Rustenburg.

"Every week I am with people dying in their huts and shacks, mothers and emaciated babies. I am with them all the time.

"I have seen women forced into sexual liaisons for economic reasons literally thrown into the street by their partners when it was discovered that they were infected."

According to statistics from the local Catholic clinic, the only one in the area, the infection rate there is now about 50%.

Dowling shares responsibility for coordinating the bishops' Aids office, a national portfolio which has exposed him to the extent of the suffering caused by Aids throughout Southern Africa.

"I do not expect what we have said in the draft to get universal approval among the bishops. It will be contentious," Dowling said.

He added that there was a perception among many that the Catholic Church's response to Aids was a simple ban on condoms and insistence on abstinence. People were unaware that the church ran the largest network of Aids programmes after the government.

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