For Dowling, desperate times call for desperate measures. In a significant departure from Vatican teaching, he recently became one of the first Catholic bishops to call for the church to lift its ban on condoms so that they could be used in the “fight for life” against a pandemic that has infected 4.7 million South Africans.
Not surprisingly, Dowling’s stance has ignited controversy among the region’s Catholics. The debate will come to a head next Tuesday, when church leaders meet at a plenary session of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference (SACBC) in Pretoria. Dowling, who has been investigating a new HIV-AIDS policy on behalf of bishops in the region, has outlined his proposals in a reflective document to be debated at the gathering. The document is sure to spark a battle between “progressives,” who believe the church could be seen to be placing dogma above people’s lives, and “conservatives,” who view as sacrosanct the Catholic belief that condoms interfere with the transmission of life.
While conference decisions are not binding, a call for the lifting of the condom ban could mean the publication of a policy bombshell in the form of a pastoral statement on HIV-AIDS by southern African bishops. Dowling also hopes it will at least encourage bishops in other regions to consider the issue themselves. “It is clear that the Vatican won’t be happy if the conference suggests easing the condom ban,” says Paddy Kearney, Durban-based director of Diakonia, an ecumenical support group. “There are powerful local leaders who watch very carefully that the local church adheres to what Rome states. The battle will be between those who follow Rome and those who are more concerned about what the issue is.”
Kearney says Dowling’s view has significant support among his fellow bishops. But although the Rustenburg bishop is admired and respected by his peers-and although many Catholic leaders faced with Africa’s harsh realities quietly offer advice on the ground that deviates from Vatican teaching-Kearney is unsure how many bishops will be prepared to say so publicly.
SACBC president Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, the most powerful Catholic in southern Africa, declined to comment ahead of Tuesday’s meeting. Viewed as a conservative on the condom issue, he recently issued a statement saying the SACBC was “fully committed” to church views on sexual morality and “abstinence and chastity before and outside of marriage and faithfulness to each other within marriage.”
Napier says the bishops will devote considerable time to debating a church response to HIV-AIDS. Dowling’s position will be included in that debate, and, says Napier, will be weighed against traditional teaching and “current scientific evidence about the quality, effectiveness and usability of condoms in situations which pose the greatest risk of infection.”
Their decision will be of more than academic interest to those in the AIDS-ravaged region. After South Africa’s central government, the Catholic church runs the region’s biggest network of AIDS programs. It administers some 85 projects in five countries, including a new initiative to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission in seven pilot hospitals and clinics.
As a coordinator of the SACBC’s national AIDS office, Dowling has considerable personal experience of the toll AIDS has taken on sub-Saharan Africa. (According to UNAIDS, 17 million AIDS-related deaths have occurred in Africa since the disease was identified in 1981, and the region is now home to more than 70 percent-or 26 million-of the 36 million infected worldwide.) “I feel passionately about this issue,” Dowling told NEWSWEEK. “I feel this is where the church should be-at the heart of suffering, bringing people hope, love and compassion. My personal stance comes out of much reflection, not to say anguish, over the enormity of the suffering of people in the AIDS pandemic, of the complex issues which have to be faced.”
Dowling’s statement does not deviate from the Catholic view that sex should occur within marriage only. “We hold the position that the only complete safeguard against infection by HIV-AIDS is abstinence from sex before marriage and faithfulness to one’s partner in marriage,” says Dowling. He believes the church should urge people to follow this lifestyle to avoid HIV and argues that the church promotes a “culture of life”-condoms are banned because they interfere with life creation-and not a “culture of death.”
Given that many people do not live according to Catholic values, he says the AIDS outbreak has meant the issue “becomes one of life and death,” with infected people able either to protect others or transmit the disease to them. “The use of a condom can be seen not as a means to prevent the ’transmission of life’ leading to pregnancy,” he argues, “but rather as a means to prevent the ’transmission of death’ to another.”
Dowling has seen that AIDS presents critical choices, such as whether a HIV-positive husband acts to prevent his wife becoming infected so their children aren’t left as orphans. The “greater good” requires the mother to stay alive, he argues, and follows the spirit and content of Catholic moral and ethical traditions. In his view, the church should challenge people to act responsibly by not infecting themselves or others and should stress values as well as providing education about the use of condoms.
The renegade bishop may well be defeated Tuesday, but many South Africans are on his side. “One of the greatest paradoxes of the AIDS epidemic has been the approach of the Catholic church,” wrote the national Sunday Times in a recent editorial. “It is in the forefront of caring for the infected and dying, but its profile on prevention has been problematic. Its message simply doesn’t take account of how people behave in the real world.”
While the church had established sound educational programs on gender issues and human rights, added the paper, its leaders are seen as judgmental and out of touch. “Worse, there is a sense that inflexible, church-made law, elevated to the level of dogma, is more important to the church hierarchy than the bitter suffering of communities, families and individuals affected by AIDS. That no matter the pain to an entire society, obscure principles must triumph.”
