In August 1996, 250 people watched as Kenya’s highest Catholic cleric, Cardinal Maurice Otunga, ceremonially set fire to boxes full of condoms and copies of “safe sex” pamphlets. In the face of the rapidly-mounting African AIDS crisis, the Vatican had responded by saying basically that while HIV and AIDS might be bad, the use of contraceptives was worse — and it will always be impossible to know how many were condemned to die miserable, wasting deaths as a result.
The Catholic Church, which I was baptized into during an event I cannot be expected to remember, is rarely stranger than when it takes up arms against contraceptives. Since Pope Paul VI’s controversial 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae especially, the Catholic hierarchy has been intransigent on the subject of artificial prophylaxis, even when it is clearly the much lesser of two (granting this momentarily for the sake of argument) “evils.”
