Light of the World, Peter Seewald's book-length interview with Pope Benedict XVI, has already drawn much attention here and elsewhere on the Web. Today, November 23, is the official publication day, and we are happy to provide excerpts from the book for our readers. Here you will find Pope Benedict talking about his first days as pope, his reaction to sexual abuse scandal and the legacy of Humane vitae--plus, his much-discussed remarks on AIDS and the use of condoms:
As a matter of fact, you know, people can get condoms when they want them anyway. But this just goes to show that condoms alone do not resolve the question itself. More needs to happen. Meanwhile, the secular realm itself has developed the so-called ABC Theory: Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom, where the condom is understood only as a last resort, when the other two points fail to work. This means that the sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.
There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.
Tim Reidy
Our society has become so permissive that we bend over backwards to rationalize bad behavior wherever we can. Rather than the Church backing down on its talk about sin, I think it needs to emphasize how sins of the flesh result in physical suffering and death (even with condoms), not to mention all of the emotional suffering caused by extramarital sex and infidelity.
I teach my kids first about the immorality of sexual promiscuity, then about the risk of sickness and death caused by sexual promiscuity, then about the fact that there is no protection from all STDs - even condoms are not 100% effective against, eg., hpv. They have enough people telling them about the "good" things about sex.