Fools Rush In – The Papal Faux Pas

Please note, before you read further, that I do not have any religious affiliations. Nor do I have anything against any religious establishment or personality. (My religion is the business of me and my God.) This post deals with an idea, not a person. A certain religious personality is recurrently mentioned in this post. I respect that person for all that he is.

If you are an ardent Roman Catholic or very fervently hate condoms, do not read further. Don’t blame me later: you’ve been warned.

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What do you do when you have a problem?

If you were a simple, normal and sensible human being, you would analyse the situation, find out what caused the problem, and then try and fix it. If the problem involves other human beings, you would try to think like them, so you could have in perspective everyone involved. And if you still couldn’t find a solution, you would submit the problem to someone better equipped than you are – resource-wise, knowledge-wise and intellect-wise. If you were a simple, normal and sensible human being.

When some people bypass all these steps in problem-solving and jump to conclusions on an issue they hardly understand, the results are often amusing. Sometimes, sometimes, they are outrageous. A recent remark made by the Pope has evoked a similar response from me and my friends. And I realised reading the papers today that we were not the only ones.

Pope Benedict XVI said in front of the international Media and an aghast medical community that condoms are useless in the battle against AIDS in Africa – they’re not weapons, but may actually aggravate the problem.

I say, respected Sir, what are your references? Have you published any research papers to this effect, or read any? If you think the solution to this problem is imparting a spiritual education to people and asking them not to be promiscuous, what is your experience in this field, and what is its success rate? If you start a campaign now around Africa on this mission of shoving spirituality down the throats of millions of people, would you guarantee the eradication of the virus in say, fifteen years? Do you have any experience in Sociology that prompted you to make a remark such as you did? What do you know about the habits and lives of millions of Africans living in conditions hardly imaginable for a majority of the world’s population?

If you indeed have an idea better than what the rest of the world thinks, can you devise a workable plan involving the required personnel, counsellors, etc, fund it, and prove to the world that you are right?

The distribution and use of condoms has proven to be effective in combating the spread of the AIDS pandemic, however slowly. Thousands of healthcare personnel are spending their lives in this endeavour. An irresponsible statement made by someone who wields immense power over the thought processes of millions of people worldwide can jeopardise the whole process.

We are not fools, Your Holiness. Please do not pull an issue too far. If you don’t like condoms, please don’t use them. But please don’t say they don’t work. You don’t have the knowledge or the experience. You don’t have the right. To solve a problem of global proportions, you need to have these. And if you say that what you have against a deadly, constantly mutating immunosuppressive virus is just a few magic words – well, thank you very much – we have the condom.

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