Author: Ophelia Benson

The other day we had a bit of Bernard Williams on moral relativism; today we get the musings of Bertie Wooster.

Wooster has been caught in apparent flagrante delicto with Pauline Stoker by her father, who dislikes him and thinks Pauline is in love with him.

“It was enough to give any parent the jitters, and I was not surprised that his demeanour was that of stout Cortez staring at the Pacific. A fellow with fifty millions in his kick doesn’t have to wear the mask. If he wants to give any selected bloke a nasty look, he gives him a nasty look. He was giving me one now…

Fortunately, the thing did not go beyond looks. Say what you like against civilization, it comes in dashed handy in a crisis like this. It may be a purely artificial code that keeps a father from hoofing his daughter’s kisser when they are fellow guests at a house, but at this moment I felt that I could do with all the purely artificial codes that were going.”

Quite profound, wouldn’t you say?

A roundup of replies to the pope.

The French foreign minister:

We consider that such comments are a threat to public health policies and the duty to protect human life.”

German Health Minister Ulla Schmidt and Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul said in a joint statement:

Condoms save lives, in Europe as well as on other continents. Modern assistance to the developing world today must make access to family planning available to the poorest of the poor – especially the use of condoms. Anything else would be irresponsible.

Dutch Development Minister Bert Koenders said it was “extremely harmful and very serious” that the Pope was “forbidding people to protect themselves”.

“There is an enormous stigma surrounding the subject of Aids and Aids sufferers face serious discrimination,” he added. “The Pope is making matters worse.”

Rebecca Hodes, of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa:

…the Pope’s “opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans”.

[T]he UN program against HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS, rebuked the pope’s comments:

“With more than 7,400 new infections each day, the world cannot stop the AIDS epidemic without stopping new HIV infections,” Geneva-based UNAIDS said. “Condoms are an essential part of combination prevention.”

German EU parliamentarian Wolfgang Wodarg, a medical doctor, also criticized the statement. He told AFP news service the pope’s “ideological unworldliness and irresponsible comments” put him “severely at fault.” Stronger words were used by German Green European deputy Daniel Cohn Bendit, who told French radio simply, “We’ve had enough of this pope.” He went on to describe Benedict’s remarks as “close to premeditated murder.”…Belgium’s Health Minister, Laurette Onkelinx, said the pope’s comments “Reflect a dangerous doctrinaire vision (that could) demolish years of prevention and education and endanger many human lives.”

The BBC’s religious affairs correspondent, on the other hand, defended the indefensible.

[T]he Church’s concern about condoms is only part of wider teaching aimed at allowing people to live better, more fulfilled lives. It believes that encouraging people to use condoms to minimise the worst effects of behaviour that in itself impoverishes their lives is to fail them…In other words, there is something at stake that is greater even than the fight against Aids – particularly as, in the Church’s view, condoms are not as effective as abstinence in combating this deadly infection. It is not as though Pope Benedict underestimates HIV, acknowledging that “the virus seriously threatens the economic and social stability of the [African] continent”.

Oh well that’s all right then – that makes it quite all right for him to tell people not to use the most effective preventive device available.

The previous pope was evil too.

In September 1990 he visited the town of Mwanza, in northern Tanzania, and gave a speech.

Tanzania, Uganda and the other countries surrounding Lake Victoria were then at the epicentre of HIV/AIDS, which was beginning its race down Africa’s highways to devastate every corner of the continent. Some nearby villages consisted only of the very old and very young, while rows and rows of wooden crosses marked the graves of others.

So the pope did his bit to help out in this nightmare situation.

He told his audience that condoms, then internationally accepted as the only real way to curtail the spread of the disease, especially in the developing world, were a sin in any circumstances. He lauded family values and praised fidelity and abstinence as the only true ways to combat the disease – seemingly ignorant of many traditional practices such as wives marrying the brothers of deceased husbands, a form of security in countries with no social services. AIDS activists, including many local African Catholics, were appalled. In that one afternoon, they said, the Vatican destroyed more than a decade of patient campaigning. Progress had been painfully slow, but awareness campaigns – with condom use the crucial component – were showing signs of having an effect. Age-old customs and habits were changing.

But then along came this evil, stupid, reckless, destructive, irresponsible, cruel, authoritarian godbothering fool to turn all that around. In that one afternoon, he sentenced whole churches full of women and children to death – and he got away with it. Nobody stopped him; no heavy hand fell on his shoulder; no cop told him to watch his head as he got in the back of the car; no ICC sent out an arrest warrant.

For many, the pope that day in Tanzania sentenced millions of Africans to death. Unabashed, he repeated the same message time and again as he moved on to neighbouring Rwanda and Burundi, countries then suffering an even higher HIV infection rate. “Thabo Mbeki (the former South African president) was pilloried for being an AIDS denialist, but the pope did much more damage and more or less got away with it,” said Godfrey Mubyazi from Tanzania.

And his successor is carrying on the work, and still getting away with it.

After the papal visit, the pandemic gathered pace. By 2010, it is now estimated, there will be 50million orphaned children in sub-Saharan Africa, 18 million of whose parents will have died from AIDS or AIDS-related illnesses. Today, more than 28 per cent of African children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. In 1990, at the time of the pope’s visit to Tanzania, the figure was 2 per cent…In communities from Lesotho to Liberia, people with wasted, emaciated bodies are waiting to die. Deprived of medical support, they are likely to suffer lonely, painful deaths.

And their children will suffer lonely, hungry lives and then perhaps the same painful deaths. Preventing such a fate for one person would be an obviously good thing to do; increasing the chances of such a fate for one person is an obviously wicked, loathsome thing to do. The pope is still doing his bit to promote illness and death. It’s beyond belief.