When it's a sin not to use a condom

Cristina Odone for The Observer

Sunday May 7, 2006

A Dominican priest I knew once told me that he had not heard a Catholic confess to using contraception since 1969. This was not because no one was on the pill, using condoms or the IUD, but because no one considered it a sin any longer. Now, there is fevered speculation that a forthcoming Vatican document will do away with the ban on condoms. Even the most optimistic Vatican watchers recognise that the church is only ready to allow the use of condoms in very specific circumstances - i.e. when the primary aim of the condom is not birth control, but disease control. Even so, a public volte-face on the subject would be revolutionary.

My friend the priest had served parishioners in London and Liverpool, not Khartoum and Kampala. In Africa, Catholics still invest their church with the kind of moral authority it has not enjoyed in the West since the Middle Ages. They've been saying no to all manner of birth control as a matter of course; their church says so. When the late Pope John Paul II continued his opposition to the use of condoms and saw no reason to make an exception of Aids-ridden Africa, liberal Catholics in the West were horrified; but Catholics in Africa saw the ban as the logical consequence of the church's promotion of conjugal sex with a view to procreation. Lifting the ban would not just free African Catholics to protect themselves. It would give a sign to the world's one billion Catholics that their moral instinct counts, by taking responsibility for their actions, deciding what steps to take according to how they will affect others.

Flexing your ethical muscle can be done without rosary, breviary or cilice. When Mr and Mrs McCarthy in Leeds decide to practise birth control because they cannot afford another child, or because Mrs McCarthy's health would be at risk, they are making a moral judgment. Someone - the unwanted baby, the exhausted mother, the poverty-ridden family - will suffer as a result of having sex without precautions, no matter how wonderful a new life can be. And the single man who uses a condom to make sure his past couplings do not put a new partner at risk may not be acting as a good Catholic boy should, but he is showing moral consideration.

The distinction between the religious and moral can be very clear. There are plenty of religious people whose behaviour is amoral and plenty of moral people who are not religious. By finally lifting a ban on condom use, the church will blur, in at least one area of our life, that distinction, although Mr and Mrs McCarthy probably knew all along that the condom was no bar to holy deeds and the rosary no insurance against evil ones.