The peasants of Europe lived in a situation very similar to the situation in Africa until the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Then it got worse. It only began to be better relatively recently, say for the past 100 years. And that’s only in Western Europe.
The Church ministered to Europe through the Black Plague. A disease which, proportionally speaking, killed more of the population of Europe than AIDS has of Africa.
The Church knows how to minister to the poor and to people who live in poverty. She knows how to minister to populations being decimated from disease. She knows the reality because She has lived it before. Her teachings have stood the test of time. They shepherded Europe through all these years, and they can shepherd Africa.
I am amazed that you bought condoms for your children. Did you encourage them to be sexually active?
You might like to read
Plagues and Peoples, written in 1979 (I can give you the reference) and/or Barbara Tuchman’s truly excellent *A Distance Mirror: Europe in the Fourteenth Century. *They shed precious light on the Black Death (bubonic plague), which broke not only once but many times over a number of centuries.
Tuchman’s book is a considered reflection on the 20th century, and its bouleversee society, including the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 which wiped out at least 20 million people (the same number as there were Russians killed in WWII).
Yes, we are sure that the Church has cared for Her flock over 2000 years - better than any other organisation during all those centuries.
However, we also know that while Christ said Feed my sheep, he was first and foremost a healer. His mission was a healing one; he raised people from the dead; he passed his healing power to his apostles.
Now it seems to me possible to infer (sorry RCC) that Christ would have wanted someone to take the initiative within the Church, not just to care for those who have been traumatised, injured, orphaned, starved, frozen, crippled, but to prevent these things from happening in the first place.
That is what we can do wth HIV, and it is what we can do with poverty, lack of education, disease and alienation. We can prevent things happening before they happen. The Church can take the initiative, and has done so in many instances. Prevent bad things from happening to people, instead of just hoping to care for them after something bad has happened.
Of course I did not encourage my beautiful sons to be sexually active. But I was a reasonably good mother, supported by a fabulous husband and my two beautiful sons. I stayed in eye contact with the boys; I loved them unconditionally; I knew the reality of life out there, which is very different from the life I grew up in, in Toronto, where they now live. And I recognised that, whatever my preferences, my sons would make their own decisions. The Jesuits say: give me a child until he is seven. Meaning that what you teach when they are young, sticks. And so my sons were not sexually active until after university, which is reasonable in today’s world. (I was a virgin when I married at 23.)
I trusted my sons because we were always able to confide in one another, because both their mother and father and others in the family tried to set appropriate examples for them, and because they could trust us. And we talked all the time, all the time.
All I could do, all I wanted to do, was to make sure that their precious lives were safe as I could possibly make them. I reiterated over and over again that if they died, they would not know. They would be in heaven, and I would be wandering around on earth, desolate, inconsolable, because I had lost one or other of them. I would be the one to suffer. And so they heard, and stayed safe - sex, driving, boating, skiing, flying, whatever.
