Grace & Peace!
Since condoms are not 100% effective, using it would lull people into a false sense of security. Your “reason” breaks down when such a thing occurs, and it has many times. Thus, the only TRULY reasonable position is the Catholic Church’s, which teaches that abstinence and chastity are the only SURE methods of not contracting AIDS.
I don’t want to go
too far off track, here. But I would urge you to explain your reasoning to the world’s desperately impoverished transactional sex-workers and see how far it gets you in preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS in the slums and ghettos of the world. I would also ask: Do you wear your seat-belt when you get into a car, knowing they’re not 100% effective against death?
You could argue that sex and getting into a car are not moral equivalents–but you’d be only partially on point (particularly given the moral and environmental ramifications involved with cars and carbon emissions). What your argument would require to be generally effective is for everyone to share your moral perspective on sex. And not everyone does. To many, sex, like getting into a car (and much like many other things we encounter in life) involves a degree of risk which must be rationally negotiated.
I would find Rome’s position on this issue much more rational if it were to be clear that it is articulating an ideal of sexual continence toward which we are called to actively aspire–realizing in the process that (due to fleeting circumstance, the vicissitudes of culture, the tragedy of human sinfulness, poor will, or ignorance) some are less capable of fully realizing that ideal than others. And for the sake of such people, I would find it quite rational for the church to assist them in whatever way it could toward attaining that goal (including helping them live longer in order to realize it), taking into consideration
where they are now in order to lead them to where they should be rather than requiring that they agree with the church’s moral position from the get-go. This sort of reality check would not necessitate the official
endorsement of condoms as tools in the fight against HIV/AIDS, but it would necessitate an end to the campaign
against their use in this
particular context. Or, if the Church were willing to lift the world’s impoverished transactional sex-workers out of their poverty, giving them food, shelter, and an income (eliminating the need for transactional sex), then I would find Rome’s disparagement of condom use in this context reasonable.
I am reminded of a Bertolt Brecht quotation with which I often struggle:
“Food is the first thing, morals follow on
So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving”
But this is all off topic so far–except in this: you have yet to demonstrate that the Roman position is open to reason.
Actually, the Fathers of some Ecumenical Councils addressed the Pope as “Father.” If you would like to pursue this topic, I would be happy to do so elsewhere (i.e., not in this thread)
For the other bishops to address the Pope as Father is their own prerogative. For the Pope to address the other bishops as sons is an affront to collegiality.
Every person so far with whom I have discussed this topic invariably has had a false understanding of papal supremacy.
My only question regarding papal supremacy (and this would probably decide the issue for me) would be this: Is the pope answerable in his lifetime to a synod of bishops, or to the church gathered in council? If I recall, canon law requires the actions of a council to be validated by the pope, which suggests who, really, holds the supremacy and who is answerable to whom.
As noted, don’t confuse the excessive papal claims over the secular State in the late Middle Ages, on the one hand, with the legitimate claims of the papacy to be “teacher of the whole world,” a principle that has the most solid basis in the patristic Church.
Where has the church explicitly repudiated these papal claims? History may have made the point moot, but I doubt that Rome has. Indeed, given that infallibility was asserted at a time of political upheaval (the rise of nationalism, Italy reclaiming the papal states, etc.), it reads just like Rome attempting to anxiously establish its power in the face of temporal authority. Which is all well and good, but this is why I see supremacy and infallibility as linked. Infallibility would not be an issue at all if it were not defined at a time of political panic and uncertainty on Rome’s part.
Actually, the more solid Catholic argument does not deny that Honorius taught heresy (though I personally believe he did not). Rather, it is the understanding that he did not teach PUBLICLY on the matter.
Insofar as Sergius I was a bishop, Patriarch of Constantinople, and insofar as the church is in the bishop and the bishop in the church (according to the formula of Cyprian), Honorius’ letter cannot be said to be private, either–Honorius was effectively writing to the church on a matter related to the teaching of the faith. If Sergius was a layperson or just a priest, I would be more inclined to concede this particular point.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
Deo Gratias!
