Feelings are running high over the decision by local bishops of the Catholic Church to maintain their long-standing objection to the use of condoms. A writer in our Letters section this week has eloquently summed up this anger in one, brutally frank sentence.
The bishops have taken their position in opposition to the best scientific evidence. Science suggests that the use of condoms can dramatically reduce the spread of HIV/Aids during intercourse from those living with the syndrome to others.
There is the generous view of the bishops’ position. It is that they feel they need to provide authoritative guidance to their following. This, they believe, is best done by demanding that church members conform to an ideal. This ideal requires that people choose abstinence over sex before or outside of marriage; and that, when people engage in sex, they do so for the purposes of conceiving children.
Underlying this ideal are a number of suppositions. We can list a couple. One is that limiting sex to the parameters of marriage alone is realisable. Another is that, if sex is confined to married couples alone, neither partner can contract a disease spread by sexual contact. From this it follows that there is, therefore, no need for condoms.
The reality, however, is somewhat different as we all, even Catholic bishops, know. Many millions of people have sexual relations outside marriage. Teenagers and young adults often feel driven by powerful urges to premarital sex. Within marriage, people often have sex for pleasure rather than for purposes of procreation. And HIV/Aids is a disease that can enter a marriage of two monogamous individuals by means of something like a needle stick injury and spread from one of them to the other through the sex in which they might engage solely in order to have children.
The Catholic bishops’ public position has nothing useful to say about these realities. For it is imprisoned in a fantasy. And the perpetuation of it depends upon a denial at least in public of the swathe of devastation that HIV/Aids is cutting through our people.
We do not wish to be uncharitable. But do we hear an echo in this behaviour of the state of mind in the Catholic Church which dictated that 359 years would have to pass before it could acknowledge (in 1992!) the simple truths in much of Galileo’s work?
Privately, the situation is that many a Catholic priest and bishop now counsels his church members to resort to condoms. The escape clause these men of the church use is that individual conscience may sometimes allow that the use of a condom is preferable to infecting a partner, or someone still to be born, with an incurable, often fatal condition. Theirs is, it seems, a necessarily covert acquaintance with reality. Proclaimed church doctrine apparently demands that it remain under cover.
Believers and others are entitled to expect greater honesty and good sense from leaders of the Catholic Church who make such elevated claims about their connections.
Serious response needed
The Cape High Court’s energetic attack on the national prosecution authority this week was a serious shot across the bows for South Africa’s premier crime fighting institution. The court accused two officials, Jan D’Oliviera deputy head of the national prosecution authority and Willie Viljoen of lying to lawyers representing international news agencies that were unwilling to hand over their tapes of the murder of gang leader Rashaad Staggie.
It is the type of behaviour we would have expected in the bad old days, when trampling rules and rights was standard practice for prosecutors and police. It is not what we would expect now from an institution that is supposed to uphold South Africa’s famously liberal constitution.
Judges rarely make such interventions, so when they do we would expect those concerned to take the criticism very seriously. We fear this has not been the case.
The court said the officials’ conduct was “of such a serious nature that it warrants investigation at the highest level”.
Nevertheless, representatives of the prosecution authority and the justice ministry brushed off the attack.
What is worrying is the apparent lack of concern on the part of the authorities when the old habits resurface.
It is not the first time that D’Oliviera has been connected with high-handed conduct. He figured during the controversy surrounding the Eikenhof Three the three African National Congress members convicted for the 1993 Eikenhof massacre who were released after a retrial was ordered and then abandoned. The defence for the Eikenhof three argued that D’Oliviera’s prosecution team had sat on evidence that could have implicated the real culprits.
We are not suggesting that D’Oliviera is necessarily unfit for his job. He is by all accounts an efficient, steely operator. But we would at least expect a more serious response from prosecutions chief Bulelani Ngcuka to such a slap from the Bench to his number two and to Viljoen, the deputy head of the Western Cape prosecution authority.
Ngcuka has shown he is good at getting results. He must take care to ensure that his employees’ zeal is always matched by a studious adherence to fair play, and that any errant behaviour is swiftly dealt with.