As I mentioned in a previous post on Pope Benedict XVI and condoms, many well-intentioned people have long believed that Catholic opposition to condom use has worsened the AIDS epidemic. Thus when the pope questioned the strategy of making condom distribution the centerpiece of AIDS/HIV prevention, many critics piled on, and suggested his views fueled the infection rate for HIV on the continent. At the Atlantic, blogger Ross Douthat is fed up with the drumbeat of recriminations against the pope and asks for hard evidence that Catholic teaching on condoms has exacerbated the epidemic in Africa. Writes Douthat:
"Do religious Africans have higher infection rates than the irreligious? Do heavily-Catholic populations contract HIV in higher numbers than Muslim, Protestant, or animist populations? Are frequent mass-attenders more likely to contract the disease than infrequent churchgoers? Do graduates of Catholic schools have higher infections than their peers? Are Africans who seek treatment at Catholic hospitals more likely to pass the disease along than people who get their medicine from secular institutions?"
Until such hard evidence is available, Douthat suggests that papal critics ponder another set of facts that might actually be more relevant on the ground in Africa:
".... consider that Benedict XVI is the head of an international institution that does as much to fight disease and poverty as any NGO in the world. The Church runs hospitals, clinics, and schools; it channels hundred of millions of dollars in donations from the developed world to the wretched of the earth; it supports thousands upon thousands of priests, nuns and laypeople who work in some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions in the world. And it does so based on the same premises - an attempt to be faithful to the commandments of Jesus Christ - that undergird the Pope's insistence on preaching chastity, rather than promoting prophylactics."
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