AIDS, Africa and Catholicism

Agent 17 sent me, for comment, an article by an ex-priest, James Carroll, in which he claims that Africa's Catholic bishops are ignoring "Catholicism’s greatest failing—the AIDS crisis ravaging their continent". Here's my answer.

What we have here is a clash of cultures, philosophy and dogma. The writer has rejected the faith he swore he fidelity to and has become not just not Catholic but anti-Catholic.

He is speaking from a purely secular, humanitarian point of view. It makes sense to someone holding that philosophy to intervene by whatever means to save the noble savages, the poor benighted Africans, from themselves. After all, they are people "just like us".

Except that they're not. Africans have a different culture from Europeans and westerners. That cannot be denied. And it accounts for the rapid and continuing spread of HIV/AIDs on the Dark Continent.

The Africans have never been particularly impressed by the Christian values of chastity or monogamy. Polygamy is practised even today in the so-called Christianized parts of Africa south of the Sahara. Yes, even among supposedly educated and "civilized" people.

And prostitution and casual sex continue as they always have, the only difference being that some people -- probably not the majority -- use condoms. (This is in marked difference to my experience in east Asia. There is lots of casual sex there too, but virtually everyone uses condoms. As a result the incidence of HIV/AIDs is significantly lower.)

The Church's stand on matters sexual, against which the writer inveighs (one wonders why he left the church in the first place) goes directly against the norms of African culture. The Church preaches (and Catholics occasionally practise) no sex outside of marriage, and only one marriage partner. Sure it's an ideal, more honoured in the breach than the observance even here "at home", but it is nevertheless a worthy ideal.

The Church has had some success in the past in imposing its values. They remain, however, foreign values to large numbers of Africans, perhaps the majority. That is why nothing the Church does or doesn't do is ultimately going to make a great deal of difference. So how the Church's continuing to insist on a moral answer, rather than a medical answer to the plague of HIV/AIDs can constitute a scandal is a mystery to me. It is a jejune argument.

As a footnote, I should say that I have referred to the Church in reference to the Catholic Church, since that's the Church whose approach is being called into question here. However, the fundamentalist Protestant sects, especially in the USA, hold the same beliefs and preach the same remedies -- abstinence, continence and monogamy.

The Economist last week reported that in large swaths of America outside the Liberal northeast, this is the main thrust of campaigns to reduce sexually transmitted disease and teenage pregnancy. In the USA it works, to a greater extent, because the culture there has its roots in the Puritanism of the early settlers, the Mayflower gang. But Puritanism came to Africa with the Protestant missionaries only in the 19th century ("Dr. Livingstone, I presume") and it never took.

To sum up, the Church's approach to reducing the spread of HIV/AIDs in Africa may be unrealistic -- Africans will always be Africans -- but it is not wrong.