Rite and Reason: An assertion by a priest in these pages, that the use of condoms is not contrary to Catholic principles, is disputed by Father Séamus Murphy.
Father Michael Kelly SJ (Rite and Reason, February 9th) suggests that Catholic moral principles support condom use to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
I'm not sure.
Understanding the Catholic position requires distinguishing between three issues: (1) what governments ought to do, (2) what Catholic relief agencies may do, and (3) how individuals ought to behave.
(1) Governments are morally obliged to do everything possible to stem the rise of HIV infection. Three facts are relevant to that obligation. First, condoms make sex safer but not safe: they reduce but do not eliminate the risk of infection. Second, abstinence promotion is no more unrealistic than condom promotion, since each requires education and behaviour modification.
Third, Uganda's experience indicates that giving priority to abstinence and fidelity promotion is more effective than condoms-only programmes. For all three reasons, public policy should prioritise promotion of abstinence and fidelity.
While condom distribution cannot be integrated with an abstinence-based strategy, since the two cannot be simultaneously advocated, it could be moral to use as a fallback, subject to evaluation of its impact on the abstinence education strategy.
(2) Catholic relief agencies should concentrate on promoting abstinence on the grounds of sexual responsibility, safety and effectiveness. Unlike governments with overall responsibility for public policy, they could not have a right to promote condoms. In addition, funding organisations providing condoms is morally equivalent to promoting condoms, and for a Catholic charity to do so disrespects Catholic teaching. It also misrepresents the charity to donors, using money in ways unacceptable to many.
(3) As regards extra-marital sex, the Church holds that it is wrong. It does not teach that condom-use increases that wrongness, nor will it let itself be pushed into giving the impression that condom-use reduces the wrongness. Besides, there cannot be moral means to immoral ends: there's no morally better way of committing adultery or cheating on taxes.
As regards marital sex, Father Kelly and others argue that double effect theory and the principle of the lesser evil justify the claim that Catholic teaching supports contraception when the intention is to protect the uninfected spouse of a HIV-infected person. I disagree.
In using double effect theory, Father Kelly assumes that its notion of intention is psychological, like motive or desire. If it were, the theory could justify anything: a person who attached a bomb to a car intending only to kill the driver could then claim that he was not to blame for the deaths of the passengers since he hadn't intended to kill them.
But the notion of intention in double effect theory is the intention or design embodied in the act. The bomber's type of act is designed, regardless of what he had in mind, to kill whoever is in the car.
The civil law criminalises types of acts and the intentions they express or embody, but it does not criminalise motives or intentions not embodied in action. There is a parallel in the area of meaning.
People laughed at Dr John Spooner's saying "Let us toast the queer old dean" because the meaning of his speech-act did not match the meaning he had in mind. One cannot make words or actions mean what one chooses them to mean: they have a public meaning or intentionality of their own.
The Church teaches that the design or intention embodied in the act of contracepting is to block the natural purpose of sex and to limit the self-giving, thereby violating the sanctity of the act and instrumentalising the body by subordinating it to the pleasure-principle. This applies regardless of the psychological intention or motive behind the married couple's act.
In using the principle of the lesser evil, Father Kelly forgets that one is entitled to choose the lesser evil only if one had no choice in the first instance. And that's the key issue: there is always choice about one's sexual acts.
Good choosing depends on freedom, and freedom on responsibility, and responsibility requires the hard work of sexual self-discipline and the acquired ability to abstain. Any religion that does not confront its members with that challenge, a matter of life and death in the HIV/AIDS context, fails them appallingly and inexcusably.
Unfortunately, condom promotion (as distinct from condom use) tends to delude us into thinking otherwise.
Yet, for a HIV-positive husband, which is more loving in relation to his uninfected wife: sex with a condom, or abstinence? I think we would admire the husband who will abstain out of love.
If he won't, but will use a condom, would his wife have a right, if she were worried about being infected, to refuse?
What will it do to the marriage if she gets the impression that he places his sexual needs above her health?
No matter what way we look at it, abstinence seems better for the health of the marriage, not to mention the health of the wife.
Let the last word go to a woman who worked for many years fighting the ravages of HIV/AIDS in Canada's First Nation communities: "Condoms keep everything in place; they allow every problem to remain. What we need is to fix our hearts."
Father Séamus Murphy SJ lectures in philosophy at the Milltown Institute in Dublin.