On March 17, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI made his first visit to the African continent by visiting Angola and Cameroon. While there, Benedict reignited a large controversy over the Catholic stance on condom use, saying that AIDS was “a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems”. Unfortunately, due to the Pope’s authority, some people who heard this comment will believe it.
Even if all Catholics abstained outside of marriage because of the Vatican’s opinions on the matter, it would not be a solution to the epidemic. The disease would continue to disseminate and kill because AIDS can be passed to children during childbirth. Furthermore, by spreading misinformation among the uninformed, the Holy See delayed and therefore aggravated the problem himself.
According to the BBC website, Africa holds approximately 13% of the world’s Roman Catholics. These are people who believe the Pope because they see him as infallible. To them, the Pope may carry as much authority on matters of health as a physician would, depending on the education of that individual. One of the largest pockets of Africa’s Catholics is the Democratic Republic of Congo. One third of the country is illiterate, and one can infer that their comprehension of AIDS as a medical crisis is disturbingly low as well. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, 1.4 million people die annually from AIDS, according to avert.org, an international charity. For perspective, this rate is similar to that at which Hitler was killing during the Holocaust; the difference of course is that the Holocaust lasted less than five years.
As anyone who understands how HIV/AIDS propagates through a population will recognize, espousing such demonstrably false information is akin to murder. The Pope, however, is not accountable for the health of his followers; he has taken no Hippocratic Oath. The doctrine that AIDS is in any way a repercussion of condom use is as ridiculous as the opinion that driving drunk is good for your health, or that priest pedophilia is best treated as a sin rather than reported as a crime. Such statements are a testament to the Vatican: their authority, not their truthfulness.
Mankind has flourished in the midst of knowledge: the average lifespan for an American male is more than thirty years longer than a comparable citizen of Afghanistan. We no longer live in a dark age of science and medicine where the extent of our knowledge is the doctrine of a religious text or the mutterings of a medicine man. Rational people must understand that the Pope’s recent remarks are not acceptable for any leader to make.
