The Norwegian document asserts that “The Catholic Church is known for its opposition to modern family planning and is therefore officially against the use of condoms."

“Modern family planning”, should not be equated with contraception.  It includes the Scientific Natural Methods of family planning to which the Catholic Church is not opposed but actively promotes.

From this mistaken premise a conclusion is drawn that is at best only partly true: “it is therefore officially against the use of condoms.”   The Catholic Church  has not official teaching about condoms except that it implicitly rejects them as contraceptives in marriage by its assertion that “every use of marriage should be open to the transmission of life.” [Encyclical, Humanae Vitae, 1968]

Using condoms outside marriage is a different matter because extra marital sex is a different reality from married intercourse and may be compared to it as a counterfeit to the genuine article.  The Catholic Church's moral guidelines for sex marriage do not apply to sex outside it. It has never said that every use of sex outside marriage should be open to the transmission of life.  This means it has never officially condemned using a condom for contraception or as a prophylactic against HIV  in fornication or adultery use a condom as a prophylactic.  There is a respectable (I would say probable) moral opinion among Catholics that they may do so and allow the contraceptive action, in accordance with the Principle of Double Effect or that of choosing the lesser of two evils.

Some Catholic moralists like Cardinal Godfried Danneels Archbishop of Brussels and Muchelen, go further and say that is a seropositive person has intercourse he ought to use a condom in oder to avoid the injustice of infecting hid partner. In passing, I remark that if the Cardinal thinks the condom is 100 percent effective, he is gravely mistaken.  We may ask whether a spouse can be justified in putting a loved one at risk.  The HIV crisis presents moral dilemmas which may call for heroism.

CATHOLIC POSITION

What then the Catholic's position on the promotion of condoms and their effectiveness to promoting condoms, the Holy See commented on  the final document of the 2001 United Nations Summit on AIDS in an "Interpretative Declaration" reiterated that the surest method to prevent (I would say “avoid”) sexual transmission of the HIV is abstinence before marriage and fidelity within it. It repeated its opposition to condoms as a means of preventing AIDS.  Here the Church is not commenting on the morality of using condoms in single acts.

It is saying that promoting condoms is not the means to deal with the HIV/AIDS crisis. I am not aware that it has given reasons for this.  I believe they  that to do so would  appear to condones the very behaviour that needs to be discouraged and leads to an increase in it by implying that there is no need to change sexual behaviour, that “everybody is doing it” and that “it is OK provided you do not get HIV.” If as happends Malawi, the condom is said to be safe without qualification, it gives a false sense of security , because in the long run condoms do not “work”.

The Catholic Church has never commented officially on the efficacy of condoms, even if some prominent Catholics have done so.  In their 2003 statement, the Catholic Bishops of all Africa (SECAM) do not mention condoms at all.

NORWEGIAN DOCUMENT

The Norwegian document, however is bolder and says, “If condoms are used correctly, there is no scientific proof of the claim that they are not 100% safe.” Neither is there any scientific proof that they are safe.  Absence of proof proves nothing.  The World Health Organisation (WHO) claims that they are 90 percent safe, “if used consistently and correctly.”  This condition, it should be noted, is seldom fulfilled.  That is why our document adds, “But in practice condoms are often not used in the right way.”

Whatever the intentions of condom promoters, advocating reliance on them cannot in practice fail to result in behaviour in which condoms are “often not used in the right way.”  Therefore, it is misleading to  defend this position by figures drawn form their theoretical effectiveness, because  life life and death depend on their effectiveness in use

After the advent of the Pill and before HIV came upon us, condoms were considered among the least effective contraceptives. How have they now become our saviours, seeing that a woman can become pregnant only during twenty-four hours of her fertility cycle, whereas she can get HIV during twenty-fours of everyday?

UNAIDS STUDY

UNAIDS commissioned a study on “Condoms for AIDS Prevention in the Developing World.”  The researchers made A Review of the Scientific Literature which they presented to UNAIDS, on January 12, 2003.  A year and a half later it has still not been published, possibly because it did not give the “right” answer. After discussing “the impossibility of answering the question, ‘How effective condoms really are?’”, the Authors come to the “The bottom line: A good, simple answer may be to say that condoms appear to be about 90% effective when used consistently and properly.  With perfect use, effectiveness may be even higher, though not 100%...."

Their Report continues, “Although there is some evidence that condoms might occasionally be permeable to virus-size particles, the vast majority of condom failures result not from leakage through latex but from “flow” factors, such as breakage, slippage, or improper use.

The Report's author also notes the difference between single use effectiveness and period effectiveness: "Most people (and WHO, like the authors of our Document, seems to be among them), who think about the effectiveness of condoms, are likely to be thinking of their effectiveness for preventing infection in a single sexual exposure to an HIV-infected partner.  This is ‘single use effectiveness’.  In multiple sexual exposures to a partner, typically over years, we measure ‘period effectiveness.’  Period effectiveness may be considerably less than single use effectiveness.”  This understatement means that if you go on throwing a dice you are almost bound to get a six.

That is why it is misleading to talk about “safe sex” or even “safer sex”, because, even with a condom, sex with an HIV positive person is always risky and one cannot at the same time be safe and at risk.  Though “safer” here can pass because of common parlance, it only means “less dangerous.”

The Report to UNAIDS says, "Part of avoiding doing harm is to tell the truth about condoms: that they are effective but not 100% effective."  Most promoters of condoms fail here. The failure rate of condoms over a series of acts is the reason why the Report can also say "there are no definite examples yet of generalised epidemics that have been turned back by prevention programs based primarily on condom promotion."

CONCLUSION

I conclude that, even when discussing the morality of using a condom as a prophylactic, we should be careful.  We need not oppose doing so, but we do need to avoid giving the impression that it works.  People who rely on a condom to protect themselves against HIV have a right to know they are at risk  Did we really need elaborate research to find this out?  A simple observation of the AIDS scene over the last two decades would have told UNAIDS that HIV infection has continued to increase in spite of such promotion.  We have Zambia and  Malawi  under our noses.

            A common response to this fact is, “Okay, but a condom is better than nothing.”  This may be true for single acts, but in the long run  it  is nearly as bad as nothing.

Professor John Moore, S.J., using a mathematical model, told me that if you take a 10% risk [=1/10] once a week for 18 months it rises to a risk of 999/1000, almost certainty.  In practice the failure rate/risk of condoms is much higher than one in ten.  That is why 20 years of condom promotion have only seen the HIV spread.

Why are people unwilling to look at the evidence? The reasons seem to be vested interests.  These are firstly philosophical: those who have believed that sex is for everyone with anyone and whenever they want it find it difficult to accept that confining it to marriage is now the only sure safeguard against infection.  Secondly, they are financial -- there is money in condoms.  Catholics who dissent from Humanae Vitae may not fall into either of those categories, but they may fear that the Encyclical may have been right after all.

Our Jesuit AIDS strategy ought to be based on the pragmatic truth that the only sure way of avoiding HIV is chastity before and after marriage. If we were to incorporate this message in all our apostolates, we might have some effect.

Richard Cremins, S.J.
Jesuit Community
Lilongwe