Sunday, February 13, 2011

`Theologians must speak out on AIDS'

A Catholic Church leader in South Africa has called for theologians to be more engaged with the moral challenges posed by AIDS in Africa.

Addressing fellow bishops from South Africa, Botswana, and Swaziland, Archbishop Buti Tlhagale of Johannesburg dealt with the issues of HIV and AIDS, which are devastating communities on the African continent, in the context of recent pronouncements from Rome on condoms and the Pope's words on a ''lesser evil''.

Reacting to commentators who had interpreted the Pope's words as an acknowledgement that condoms were somehow permissible, Archbishop Tlhagale stressed: ''The Holy Father did not say - as some people have claimed - that prostitution with the use of a condom can be chosen as a lesser evil. The Church teaches that prostitution is immoral and should be shunned.''

He continued: ''My question is: What is the status of the principle of a lesser evil in Catholic moral theology today? Is casuistic moral thinking still in vogue? I sense a stagnation, a poverty of moral thinking in Africa and a dependency on American-European thinking. HIV and AIDS is not a North Atlantic problem. It is an African problem. It is a disease Africa shares with gay people in Europe and North America. 

''When Europe thinks about moral issues around HIV and AIDS, they think of gay people. In Africa, we think about millions of ordinary men, women and youth, it is high time we challenge our moral theologians to assess the moral challenges of HIV and AIDS. It is high time for the conference to invest in the training of moral theologians in a more systematic fashion. Cynics would say, what more is there to think about? We have the Ten Commandments! 

''We have a duty not to allow the imaginative genius of the human spirit to stagnate or die.''