I’ve gotten a bunch of e-mails about the stories circulating in the Catholic press that the Holy See may be issuing a document dealing with the topic of condoms and the transmission of HIV/AIDS.
From what I can tell, the known facts seem to be these:
1) Pope Benedict asked one of the Vatican dicasteries (the Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care) to prepare such a document (after some cardinals started making remarks in the press that sounded favorable toward using condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, thus creating a public issue that needs clarification).
2) The document is presently in the consultation stage (word is that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is now looking at it).
3) When the consultation is finished, the document will be forwarded to B16 for him to decide what (if anything) to do with it. So NONE of this is a done deal at this point.
Now, let’s go deeper: John Allen says (EXCERPTS),
Sources told NCR this week that a draft study currently being prepared by the Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care would provisionally accept the use of condoms in the narrow context of a married couple, where one partner is infected with HIV/AIDS and the other is not, as a means to prevent transmission of the disease.
Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragàn, President of the Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care, confirmed in an April 23 interview with the Roman newspaper La Repubblica that his office was asked by Pope Benedict XVI to look into the subject.
Speaking on background, an official in Lozano Barragàn’s office later told NCR that the draft takes a favorable position on the use of condoms to halt the spread of the disease "inside marriage and the family, not outside of it."
GET THAT STORY. (CLINICAL LANGUAGE WARNING)
Allen does a pretty good job explaining the moral dimensions of what the document might say, but let’s get into the moral issue involved and try to envision what the document might say if it comes out along the lines that Allen indicates are currently being discussed.
This matter is sensitive enough, though, that I’ll put the substantive discussion of it below the fold for the sake of decorum.
(CLINICAL LANGUAGE WARNING BELOW.)
Let’s start with the basics: Sex has both a unitive and a procreative aspect and the effects of condom use on both of these need to be examined.
First, let’s consider the effects of condom use on the procreative aspect of sex: Would it be immoral to use a condom on the grounds that it blocks the procreative dimension of sex?
The natural impulse of many of us (myself included) would be to say yes. Procreation cannot be interfered with, and so it would be immoral to use a condom to prevent the transmission of HIV due to the fact that it renders the act infertile.
But wait a moment. The law of double effect may apply here.
Suppose a married couple that otherwise accepts and intends to implement the Church’s teaching on human sexuality has one partner who is infected with HIV and they want to know whether they can use a condom to engage in sexual intercourse with a reduced risk of HIV transmission.
If they asked me about the advisability of this, the very first thing I would tell them is that condoms aren’t foolproof and don’t always stop the virus. The risk of transmission is too great, in my opinion, and they should refrain from having sex at all on grounds of prudence. If you really love your spouse, you won’t want them to take the risk of contracting HIV from you.
But suppose that they are willing to set this issue aside and want to know about the intrinsic moral structure of the act–not its prudential evaluation: Could they use the condom if conditions of prudence are set aside?
What they would be doing, in this case, is to use a piece of plastic to stop the virus from passing from one partner to the other.
Is using a piece of plastic to stop a virus from jumping from one person to another an okay thing in principle?
Sure it is. That’s why doctors and nurses and dentists and dental technicians wear gloves when they’re doing examinations that could bring them into contact with bodily fluids. Stopping the transmission of HIV by using pieces of plastic is well established.
But how does that square with the procreative aspect of sex? Would a couple using a condom to stop HIV be using the fact that the condom also stops sperm either as a means or as an end?
If the couple is a good Catholic couple that wants to keep the sex act open to life then it would seem that the blockage of sperm along with the virus may be neither a means nor an end.
It’s not an end (a goal) because if one partner didn’t have HIV then they wouldn’t be using the condom. The sperm isn’t what they want to stop. They’re not trying to stop the sperm–that’s not their goal–they’re trying to stop the virus. Stopping the virus is the end they are pursuing by using the piece of plastic.
It also may not be a means because the couple may not be stopping the sperm in order to stop the virus.
The question here hinges on whether certain spermatazoa are themselves infected with HIV and can infect the partner or whether the HIV is free-floating in the semen.
Assume, for the moment, that it’s the latter. In this case the stopping of the sperm would not be a means to the end of stopping the virus. It would simply be a side effect, and if it’s only a side effect then it’s potentially morally justifiable on the principle of double-effect.
But what if the virus is currently embedded in the spermatazoa themselves? In that case stopping the spermatozoa might be considered a means to stopping the virus, but it might (notice I said might) be justifiable on self-defense grounds.
Consider an example: Suppose that a person who otherwise has a right to come into my home (let’s say it’s my college roommate, who co-pays the rent) has become a suicide bomber and has swallowed a bomb that will go off once he enters our dorm room. Stopping him from coming in may be the only way to stop the bomb from coming in and detonating. In the same way, stopping a particular spermatozoon that has become infected with HIV might be justifiable on self-defense grounds.
(It certainly would be if someone were trying to introduce an HIV-infected spermatozoon into your body through something other than sex, you could clearly stop such a spermatozoon on self-defense grounds.)
So it seems to me that there may be a double-effect argument (possibly in combination with a self-defense argument) that could apply here.
All of this deals only with the procreative aspect of the sexual act, though. None of it deals with the unitive aspect, and we have to consider that because the unitive aspect of the sexual act is also an essential element of it.
To my mind, the unitive aspect of sex is not just the sense of emotional closeness or shared sexual sensations that the spouses get from the act. They could get such things through mutual masturbation. In order for the unitive aspect of the act to exist, the relevant bits of their anatomy must be united in a specific way.
That doesn’t happen if you put a piece of plastic between them.
What happens in that case is the two people are really uniting themselves to a piece of plastic and not to each other. They are then manipulating the piece of plastic in a way that brings about sexual pleasure and release, which thus appears to turn the conjugal act into an act of mutual masturbation with a piece of plastic in the middle and not a unitive sexual act of husband and wife.
So it seems to me that, regardless of whether double-effect (and self-defense) could make the loss of the procreative aspect of the act tolerable, the destruction of the unitive aspect is something that cannot be gotten around.
The act of using a condom to prevent the transmission of AIDS in a sexual act will still be immoral.
But is it, as some cardinals have suggested, a "lesser evil"?
The question at this point would be "Is it a lesser evil to mutually masturbate with your spouse than it is to have sex with your spouse in a way that is likely to kill?"
It’s always hard to compare the gravity of one mortal sin versus another, but it seems to me that the answer to that question is likely to be "Yes, it is less evil to mutually masturbate with your spouse than to have sex in a way that will likely kill your spouse."
You’d still be committing a mortal sin either way, but it seems to me that the Holy See could judge that it is a lesser mortal sin to do mutual masturbation via a condom than to kill your spouse via HIV infection.
I don’t know for sure whether the Vatican document that is under consideration is focused narrowly on the situation of husbands and wives using condoms to prevent HIV transmission or whether it is broader than that, but the "lesser evil" principle would seem to have a broader application than just to husbands and wives.
Consider this:
Homosexuals are already performing sexual acts that are non-procreative (because you need both sexes to have a kid) and non-unitive (because members of the same sex don’t have the relevant bits of anatomy to unite), so a homosexual who committed a condomistic sex act would need to go to confession and say, "I had homosexual sex," but it doesn’t seem that he would be obliged to add " . . . and I also rendered it non-procreative and non-unitive by using a condom."
If that’s the case then the lesser evil principle might apply here, too, and the question would be: Which is worse? Committing homosexual sex in a way that has a higher or a lower chance of killing the other person?
The answer would seem to be the latter. They’re both mortal sins, but the former seems to be a worse mortal sin than the latter. (In fact, if someone is HIV-infected and has homosexual sex then it seems to me that he would be obliged to say "I had homosexual sex AND I did so knowing that I have HIV and was putting the other person’s life at risk.")
If the Holy See comes to conclusions on these matters, it would then have the question of whether to announce them publicly.
That’s a prudential question that has to take into account the effect of media distortion on such matters and whether speaking the truth about the subject on such a high-profile level would do more harm than good.
In principle, I don’t have a problem with the Church announcing the truth about any moral question–answering moral questions is essential to the work of the Church, and it cannot duck them just because they’re delicate or controversial. But there is still a real question about the way in which the Church should announce the truth: Should it come through an official announcement of a Vatican dicastery, with the pope’s blessing and thus authority behind it, or should it come more informally and non-magisterially, through a developing consensus of moral theologians?
That’s a question for B16 to answer.
It’s why they pay him the big bucks.
Keep him in your prayers on this one, won’t you?
