If we heard it once last week, we
heard it a hundred times: the pope had a 'mixed legacy.' Thank
you,
Eleanor Clift, Bill Clinton, et al. When asking liberal-minded
Roman Catholics from wealthy countries, the list of the Pope's
shortcomings seems to revolve primarily around his failure to
accomodate to their lifestyles by adjusting church doctrine to
suit. Occasionally, less provincial complaints are voiced and
these concern the Church's attitude toward sexual mores, contraception
and the spread of AIDS, especially in Africa where the Church is
growing rapidly (apparently inspite of this same attitude- go figure.)
We were listening to a report
about Catholicism in Africa on NPR's Morning Edition. Reporter
Ofaibea Quist Arcton introduced the subject of the pope's more
controversial stands, specifically the Church's strict prohibition of
the use of condoms, "which some have characterized as criminal given
the prevalence of AIDS on the continent." Bishop Daniel Nlandu of
Kinshasa responds, "The position of the Catholic Church is clear. You
can't just assume that people cannot exert self control...People must
adopt a more responsible attitude toward their sexual conduct."
The call to personal accountability is a universal one in Christianity
but there is no denying that to exercise self-control is especially
compelling in Africa where behavior alone is responsible for 99% of AIDS infections.
While liberals will characterize this attitude as "criminal," we
offer this report
from The World and I, an online magazine . It details the
remarkable progress that Uganda has had in stemming the incidence of
HIV there. Many factors contributed, but close
cooperation between government, faith- based organizations and the health
community was the key to success:
[President of Uganda] Museveni's policy allowed health professionals and religious leaders to sit at the same table. Key strategies disarmed the potential controversy:The model for combating AIDS in Uganda has been called ABC: Abstinence, Be faithful and use Condoms (carefully and consistently). In this model, A and B relate to primary behavior change (risk elimination) and C relates to risk reduction. Edward C. Green of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies wrote the booklet for USAID Faith-Based Organizations: Contributions to HIV Prevention. He sums up the central conflict between the "pragmatic" and the "moral" approaches:
- Religious leaders were not asked to jeopardize their theologies.
- Limited condom distribution, as a health concern, continued quietly under the Ministry of Health.
- Sexual abstinence and marital fidelity were emphasized as the primary solution to HIV/AIDS and stressed publicly.
- When the social marketing of condoms was permitted, it specifically targeted commercial sex traffickers.
...a conflict remains in many countries between taking a medical or 'realistic' approach to AIDS prevention . . . and taking a religious or 'moral' approach. The popular press and some AIDS literature pit medically enlightened progressives who recognize human behavior as it actually is against religious conservatives who moralize about how behavior ought to be. The former emphasize condom use and the treatment of sexually transmitted infections, whereas the latter emphasize abstinence and fidelity.As we would expect from the cream of the intellectual elites at Harvard, the condom approach is touted by "enlightened progressives" who recognize "reality" against conservatives who "moralize" about behavior. Flying in the face of "enlightenment," Museveni's strategy was to emphasize the the 'A' and 'B' aspects of the model, and indeed he credits that with Uganda's success. In this, he enlisted the support of not only the Catholic Church, but all other Christian denominations and Muslims as well. He approved the distribution of condoms in urban areas "so the prostitutes could save their lives" but condemned their "distribution to primary school pupils ...[as] dangerous and disastrous." The success of this approach is undisputed: infection rates in Uganda have gone from more than 30% in the early 1990's to about 6% in 2003.