Editorial
By Terry Sanderson
There’s nothing theologians like better than trying to decipher what the hell their colleagues are talking about. And then producing an interpretation that is equally impenetrable.
We saw a perfect example of this during the week, when the pope said something (who knows what?) about condoms and the Catholic Church’s teachings on their use. Did he mean that the policy had changed? Did he mean that the policy had not changed? Was he starting a debate? Was he ending a debate?
Trying to find a way through the fog of inflated and bewildering language (why use one word when you can write a three volume treatise?) is like paddling in treacle.
But it keeps the bejewelled old celibates in the Vatican happy, helps them pass their days poring over the minutiae of what this word meant or what that phrase amounted to. It’s a fascinating game when the crosswords and sudokus run out.
In the meantime, the African continent is ravaged by a disease that has no cure and which, without expensive drugs, cannot be controlled. People die — slowly — in miserable, pain-wracked circumstances. These are young people with young families. They simply responded to their bodies’ urges for sexual experience and tried, at the same time, to abide by the Church’s teachings. The Church’s demand for abstinence is a call to deny human nature, and very few of us want or are capable of resisting one of the strongest of all life’s urges (not even priests, it seems).

The victims of HIV infection leave orphaned children who then often have to fend for themselves in a cruel and poverty-stricken society. The Guardian carried a report on the mixed responses in Africa to the pope’s ambiguous statement – they range from pragmatic compassion to hardline denial.
And while this happens to tens of thousands of people, the old fools at the Vatican bicker endlessly over whether the pope meant only male prostitutes, whether female prostitutes we also included, or — more likely — that it was prostitutes engaged in homosexual activities where no procreation could result. If there is any chance of procreation — adding another Catholic to the flock — the pope is adamant that condoms are verboten, even if just one of the participants is HIV positive and therefore likely to transmit it to the other.
One thing is clear – the interview on which these convoluted arguments are based were the opinions of one man. They were not an intimation that the Catholic Church is changing its teachings on condoms (no “U-turn” as some papers triumphantly announced). Indeed, it is clear that the ban on rubbers remains inexplicably in place.
The Vatican often labels other people “intrinsically disordered” and “morally evil”, but its own teachings in this area are surely wickedness personified. And this week’s events hold them up to a very unflattering light.