VATICAN CITY (RNS) The Vatican office responsible for health care matters has acknowledged that it stopped work on a long-expected study of condoms and AIDS and that “nothing serious” was done on the project.
“There was a project, there was, but nothing serious was delivered,” said Bishop Jose Luis Redrado Marchite, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers.
Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, former head of the health care council, said in 2006 that his staff was preparing a “profound study,” requested by Pope Benedict XVI, that would consider “both the scientific and technical aspects linked to the condom, as well as the moral implications in all their amplitude.”
The church has never definitively addressed the use of condoms for HIV prevention, but Benedict provoked an international furor last March when he told reporters on a flight to Africa that “one cannot overcome the problems (of AIDS) with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem.”
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