Cardinal who lied about condoms is dead

Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the chief propagandist of the Vatican’s reactionary “family” agenda, which forbids contraception, abortion, homosexuality and the use of condoms to prevent AIDS, has died at the age of 72.

He sprang to prominence in the English-speaking world in 2003, when he appeared in a Panorama programme entitled “Sex and the Holy City” and said that “safe sex” was a myth and proposed that health ministries require condom packets to carry a health warning similar to that on cigarettes. He caused further controversy when he claimed that HIV could pass through tiny holes in latex.

Such was the international outrage over these remarks, that a follow-up edition of Panorama, entitled “Can condoms kill?” was produced. It brought forth a veritable army of experts to testify that when used correctly, condoms were highly effective in resisting the transmission of HIV, and were not porous as the Cardinal had scandalously claimed. Many of the scientists interviewed had been quoted by Trujillo in his evidence, and they affirmed that he had ruthlessly misused or misrepresented their evidence.

The Vatican branded his remarks “imprudent” and Ratzinger was obliged to set up a commission to look into whether there were any circumstances whereby condoms could be permitted in the prevention of the spread of AIDS. Little has been heard of it since, but now that Trujillo is dead, it might report its findings.

His strident denunciations of abortion (states that permit it, he said, are ‘totalitarian’), stem cell research and homosexual partnerships as “absolute emptiness”. Even those couples who used “natural family planning” were condemned as “choosing a conjugal life willingly made sterile”.

In Latin America he was an implacable opponent of Liberation Theology, a relentless conservative and a proponent of Orthodox Catholicism. While the anti-abortion movement and the anti-science brigade put on their black arm bands, secularists and liberals within the Church will be putting the flags out at the news of the passing of this foolish and dangerous man.

09 May 2008