LONDON (Reuters) - The lives of Roman Catholics in some of the countries worst hit by HIV/AIDS are being put at even greater risk by advice from their churches that the use of condoms does not prevent transmission of the disease, according to a British television program.
[...]
"The Aids virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon," Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, told the program.
"The spermatozoon can easily pass through the 'net' that is formed by the condom."
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The Archbishop of Nairobi, Raphael Ndingi Nzeki told the program: "AIDS...has grown so fast because of the availability of condoms."
While in Luak near Lake Victoria, Gordon Wambi, director of an AIDS testing center, said he had been prevented from distributing condoms because of church opposition.
[Steve] Bradshaw [reporter on the BBC Panorama program "Sex and the Holy City" that will be aired in Britain on Sunday night] told Reuters the program team did not go out looking for the story, but stumbled across it during research.
"We heard the same line so many times from different people in different places that we decided to approach the Vatican," he said.
[...]
"These incorrect statements about condoms and HIV are dangerous when we are facing a global pandemic which has already killed more than 20 million people, and currently affects at least 42 million," the WHO told the program.
It conceded condoms could break or be damaged and permit passage of semen, but said they reduced the risk of infection by 90 percent and were certainly secure enough to prevent passage of the virus if not torn.
Panorama said scientific research had found intact condoms were impermeable to particles as small as sexually transmitted infection pathogens -- a view rejected by Trujillo.
"They are wrong about that...this is an easily recognizable fact," he told the program.
From Nicaragua to Kenya and the Philippines, the Panorama team found the same tale from the Catholic church -- that condoms can kill.
"Condoms can kill."
In yet another Catholic irony of cause and effect, condoms can also kill the chances for parishioners to make the children that priests can sodomize and church leaders can pretend not to know about.
The willingness to endanger or kill people in distant countries by propagating the most blatant of lies is one more total collapse of moral leadership — most recently political leadership in the United States, now Catholic leadership in the Vatican.
Good Catholics, like good Americans, must rise up and demand accountability from the murderous liars who have seized control of their respective credibility — as a world religion, and as a world power.
Every condom is a killer. Here's the BBC story. Every sperm is sacred. Here's Monty Python.
