No change in Church teaching

Local “experts” get it wrong (again) interpreting Benedict’s remarks

By Staff Writers
Analysis
THERE has been no change in the Church’s teaching against the use of condoms, despite the excitement in local media about what they have called ‘historic moves’ and a headline in The West Australian, Experts laud Pope’s rethink on condoms.
The local confusion began with an inaccurate cable story and was expanded by the general fixation among journalists and health ‘experts’ on the imagined virtues of condoms.
Most Australian Bishops were on their way to Sydney over the weekend to attend the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, so there was little authoritative local comment.
However, on Monday morning Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, and Bishop Anthony Fisher OP of Parramatta both issued statements during the week that clarified the Pope’s position.
As Bishop Fisher, who also teaches bioethics at Oxford University, said: “The Pope has not deviated from or altered in any way Catholic teaching on the intrinsic wrongness of contraception or on reserving sexual intercourse (the marital act) to marriage, that is of a man and a woman”.
Prof Michael Daube, the WA president of the Public Health Association of Australia, was reported in The West Australian on 22 November as saying the “small but historic shift” would be widely welcomed as a recognition of the health needs of modern society.
Everything the Pope says on these subjects recognises the real health needs of modern society, but modern society and its health experts do not recognise the wisdom of what he says.
Year by year our Public Health Department reports record numbers of teenage pregnancies and abortions at ever-reducing ages and record numbers of sexually transmitted infections among teenagers and young adults.
The experts’ solution to this truly serious situation is inevitably a call for more condoms.
It is time for our Public Education and Public Health authorities, and the Governments that fund them, to think seriously about what is happening to so many of our young people.
It is time to offer to them a deeper, more human understanding of their sexuality.
In sub-Saharan Africa, teenagers tend to have a despairing belief that ‘the virus’ will get them.
That changes when they encounter the Church’s teaching about how the virus is spread and how they can protect themselves and their future family life by the virtues of chastity and fidelity. They embrace it because it gives them a future they value.