Sydney bishop condom claim
Sydney Catholic bishop Anthony Fisher yesterday attacked the promotion of condoms as a method of HIV prevention.
If there’s a scientific inaccuracy in anything that any Catholic official has taught, then we should, and no doubt will, correct it. But it has to be recognised, I think, that the WHO -“ or at least some of its officials -“ have been very ideologically committed to the promotion of condoms, Fisher told ABC Radio National’s Religion Report.
Fisher said that permitting condom use was acquiescing in promiscuity or irresponsibility.
AIDS Council of NSW president Adrian Lovney told Sydney Star Observer the recent Vatican claims that condoms allow HIV to pass through were sheer lunacy and patently false.
The scientific research is well-documented that condoms are 99 percent effective in preventing the transmission of HIV among other things, including obviously pregnancy, which I suspect is at the nub of the Catholic Church’s concerns, Lovney said. The Vatican claims were made on the BBC TV program Panorama which aired this week on ABC TV. Colombian cardinal Trujillo’s claimed that condoms allowed HIV to pass through because they are porous was based on a report by Jacques Suaudeau, a French priest employed by the Vatican Pontifical Council for the Family.
The program sparked outrage from health experts worldwide when it was screened two weeks ago in the UK, drawing the condemnation of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS.
