Bishops reject condoms again. (News in Brief: South Africa).

Pretoria--Once again the Catholic bishops of South Africa have rejected the use of condoms in the battle against AIDS. Despite the magnitude of the epidemic, the bishops said that using condoms solves nothing; they only destroy people's moral fibre and encourage casual sex. It is, they repeated, an immoral and misguided weapon.

Since 1985, about 1.6 million people in Africa have been infected with the AIDS virus and more than 25 million are HIV-positive. At least 600,000 children have been orphaned by the deadly disease. Southeast Africa has a long history of homosexual abuse going back to the 1860s.

The Catholic Church joined the struggle to combat AIDS in Africa in the early 1980s when the disease first exploded. It is proud of running some of the most respected programs throughout Africa to help victims and their families. In October 2002, the president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum (Of one heart), Archbishop Paul Joseph Cordes, visited Uganda bringing with him $500,000 U.S. Part of this papal donation was allocated to AVSI (Association of Volunteers for International Service), a Catholic nongovernmental organization created by members of the "Communion and Liberation" movement. The project objectives are to give orphans a family; to foster education through the construction and support of schools; to offer health education to prevent AIDS; to offer professional training, especially for boys who leave juvenile detention centres; to establish homes run by the Missionaries of Charity for children terminally ill with AIDS.

Archbishop Cordes remains optimistic. "Uganda has become the laboratory country in the struggle against AIDS." It is one of the few nations where the rate of infection of the HIV virus has registered a decrease, from 9.51% to 8.30%," he noted in a press release.

In July 2002, the South African Catholic bishops denounced the use of condoms to fight AIDS. They called for chastity before marriage and fidelity in marriage. The Vatican backed their opposition to the use of condoms. But some health workers and religious workers continue to hand them out to married couples when one partner is infected, or to sexually-active young people, in the mistaken belief that this will slow the disease down (see also "Teen sex" under United States in this issue) (CNN, Tablet, Zenit, Nov. 2002).