Daniel Madigan, SJ, an associate professor of theology at Georgetown and senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, is an Australian Jesuit and a distinguished scholar of religions. Here he is on CNN.com addressing the pope's recent comments on the use of condoms to prevent HIV/AIDS, a good thing to think about today, on World AIDS Day.
The pope was not asking himself whether it's OK to use condoms. He was addressing the following question: "If someone has already decided to have sex outside a married relationship (perhaps even outside a heterosexual relationship), is it better to do it with or without a condom?" It's obviously better to do it with a condom because, as the pope pointed out, the person is obliged in that situation not to risk infecting a partner or being infected. If the intercourse is heterosexual, the person is further obliged not to risk conceiving a child that will not be brought up in a stable family and might not see the light of day at all.
Though the Roman Catholic Church has always been clear in its position on the immorality of intercourse outside of marriage, Pope Benedict has done us all a favor by observing publicly that the use of a condom in such circumstances can be understood as a sign of a burgeoning moral awareness. It is this issue of responsibility that has always been the sticking point. People have presumed that in its condemnation of condom use, the Catholic Church is somehow encouraging irresponsible, unprotected sex. But in fact it's been discouraging everything except faithful monogamous sex. Its teaching about artificial contraception has only ever been about marriage; it has never had anything to do with any other kind of sexual activity.
Intercourse between husband and wife should always be open to conceiving new life; therefore, contraception was considered wrong because it was seriously unnatural. The problem is that all condom use came to be thought of as absolutely wrong, not just wrong in marriage. If using condoms were absolutely wrong, then it must be wrong for gay men to use them, too. If it were absolutely wrong, then it must be wrong for fornicating teens to use condoms, too. A disastrous misunderstanding!
However, church authorities have usually avoided the more complex explanations -- no "maybe," no "in certain conditions." That's because they believe that the public just wants a simple "yes" or "no" -- and preferably a "yes." They fear that anything other than an absolute "no" will be interpreted as an absolute "yes." And, it should be added, they have unjustly censured highly qualified moral theologians who have dared to say "maybe."
That a pope has now introduced a "maybe" has evoked a flustered reaction. Official clarifications are given that then need further explanation. Churchmen argue over whether what he said is anything new, whether it represents a major policy change or whether it is just really the same old line. In many respects, it is an old line. But the old line was never the simple "no" it has so long been thought to be. The Catholic moral tradition has always been much more sophisticated than that.
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1345793?eng=y
There is an old canard that conservative Catholics want everything reduced to black and white and reject any shades of gray. In most cases I have dismissed this as an ad hominem attack, but in this case I am less sure. Given the number of conservatives who hang on every word Benedict XVI utters on, say, the liturgy, this response is very surprising and suggests that there may be some truth to this claim.
"The pope was not asking himself whether it's OK to use condoms."
Just to the left there is a CNN Ticker that says:
"Condoms to prevent AIDS may be OK"
Which just shows how hard it is for the MSM to grasp the distinction that Madigan is making.
His argument falters with the conventional assertion that ''intercourse between husband and wife should always be open to conceiving new life''. Nature, where we read the natural law, guarantees that, for a healthy fertile woman, conceiving new life is absolutely impossible roughly 80% or more of the time in any month, year, and decade. The unitive end can be pursued nearly any time. The procreative end does not exist most of the time. The logical consequences are to forbid intercourse outside of the short period when the transmission of life is humanly possible or clean up the argument. This smacks of the black-and-white problem David Cruz-Uribe SFO mentions above. That's life, literally.