NATION : Chastity, Not Condoms, Advised
The U.S. Roman Catholic Church should drop its qualified support for teaching about condoms in public schools as a way of preventing AIDS, and should urge that youngsters be taught chastity instead, a committee of bishops said today.
“There is no such thing as safe, or safer, sex. That’s an illusion,” said Archbishop Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on the HIV Statement. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.
The committee’s draft statement revises an earlier document released by the church’s 50-member Administrative Board in December, 1987, which said the church could tolerate public schools’ providing information about condoms as long as sexual abstinence outside of marriage was presented as the “only morally correct and medically sure way” to prevent AIDS.
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