The Pope Versus Condoms and the Pills

The Holy See, by having an observer status at the UN unlike many other religions, has made it possible for the Catholic Church to play active roles in many international conferences organized by the United Nations. During the last two decades of my work with the United Nations, I had seen delegations sent by the Vatican, energetically involved in the negotiations of Plans, Programmes or Platforms of Action of key UN Conferences since the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights, the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, the 1995 World Summit for Social Development, and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women which I was officially assigned to work in the preparatory process. The Church took high profile position at the 1995 Bejing Conference on Women to influence representatives of the governments, non-governmental organizations and the media by propagating the text of the encyclical “Humanae Vitae”, a conservative Church dogma created by Pope Paul VI in 1968 aiming to ban birth control. The Vatican delegation fought tooth and nails with many progressive NGOs and women’s groups when they promote the use of condoms and birth control pills in family planning programmes and campaigns to prevent HIV/AIDS. According to “Humanae Vitae”, using artificial birth control such as the pills and condoms works against the Church’s concept of “marriage” which is to “foster love between partners in order to produce children”. All through the two-year process of preparations of the World Conference on Women, Vatican Spokesmen tried every means to influence the negotiated text of the Platform for Action, a document that the participants agreed to issue to the World when the Conference ended. They targeted for attack the agenda items on reproductive healths, reproductive rights, women’s rights and gender equality. Three months before opening of the Beijing World Conference on Women, Pope John Paul II sent a letter the Conference’s Secretary-General, Gertrude Mongella, to make a strong point that according to the Church’s outlook, “Women and men have been called by the Creator to live in profound communion with one another, with reciprocal knowledge and giving of self, acting together for the common good with the complementary characteristics that which is feminine and masculine. No response to women’s issues can ignore women’s role in the family or take lightly the fact that every new life is totally entrusted to the protection and care of the women carrying in it in her womb”. In the same letter the Pope continued to say that “in order to respect this natural order of things, it is necessary to counter the misconception that the role of motherhood is oppressive to women, and that a commitment to her family, particularly to her children, prevents a woman from reaching personal fulfillment, and women as a whole from having an influence in society”. On this subject, I recently read an article by John Allen Jr., the senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and the author of “The Rise of Benedict XVI, on the Pope vs. the Pill . I disagree with him when he said that Catholicism can and does change. For me, I see no evidence that the Church can change. It seems to me that Catholic Church authorities would rather look the other way than face the facts that, in following the Church’s teaching against the use of condoms and pills, youth around the world are dying every day because of HIV/AIDS, and millions of women are sinking deeper every day into a blackhole of poverty because of producing too many children to feed and care for.

Filed under United Nations, World Affairs |