ROME (CNA/EWTN) The Vaticans representative to the United Nations in Geneva says international relief agencies and faith-based groups are beginning to show an openness to the Catholic solution for Aids.
We are at the beginning of a convergence in the sense that functionaries of international institutions and organisations, and people from faith-based groups, are talking across the lines and coming to respect each other a bit more, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi told Catholic News Agency.
Archbishop Tomasis comments come three decades after the first medical paper recognising the illness was published in the United States.
The most significant point of departure between the Catholic Church and many other bodies involved in the fight against Aids is over the use of condoms as a preventative measure.
It has been proven and even documented now that the really effective way is to change your behaviour.
And so, this has been our insistence, Archbishop Tomasi said, stressing the Catholic Church’s emphasis on behavioural change over condom distribution.
His comments also come in the week that a new report suggests millions of people are dying from Aids because Western governments are refusing to accept that condoms are ineffective in curbing the spread of the disease.
The report, entitled The Catholic Church and the Global Aids Crisis, is the work of American public health expert Matthew Hanley.
We are always told that condoms are the best known technical means for preventing HIV transmission, but we are never told that condom promotion has failed to reverse those most severe African epidemics; behavioural modification, on the other hand, has brought them down, says Hanley. Hanley estimates that six million infections would have been averted in sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade if the Catholic approach of fidelity and abstinence had been promoted instead of widespread condom use.
That this is not common knowledge should give us pause. Public health leaders may increasingly recognise this reality but remain, by and large, reluctant to emphasise behavioural approaches to Aids control over technical solutions.
Hanleys report also says that in east Africa, Uganda saw a 10 per cent drop in the number of people with Aids between 1991 and 2001 after investing in abstinence programmes.
The rates of infection only began to climb again when foreign donor agencies insisted on the increased use of condoms in the fight against Aids.
