As the Vatican reasserts its hard line on condom use, Catholic Aids activist
Martin Pendergast talks to
Chris O’Connor about prevention and pragmatic support for Catholics
with HIV
Catholic priests, even ex-priests, often look well scrubbed and exude gravitas.
Martin Pendergast
is no exception. Even though he left the priesthood some 30 years ago, he
still carries an air of
polished, priestly authority. I have come to Martin’s east London home
to find out more about his work with Positive Catholics, Catholics for Aids
Prevention and Support (CAPS) and the Lesbian and Gay Catholic Caucus. While
his mother is sent to watch Countdown, we talk about the church’s responsibility
to HIV positive people and their place in the Catholic Church.
Martin is not every Catholic’s cup of tea. Not so long a go, a fundamentalist
Catholic group described Martin as
having “a notorious public profile as a homosexual activist involved
in running several dissident organisations” (see box over the page).
His “notorious public profile” includes a seat on the UK government’s
advisory committee for teenage pregnancy and being on the board of trustees
for the National Aids Manual (NAM), as well as being secretary of CAPS.
He and partner Julian Filochowski, a former director of the Catholic Overseas
Development Charity (CAFOD), have also faced vitriolic attacks from hard line
conservative Catholic groups in the UK over their work around HIV and Aids.
Martin talks with authority about HIV prevention, the church and reconciling
his faith within an organisation he feels has marginalised him and many like
him. After studying theology in Rome, Martin was ordained in the Carmelite
Order in 1970. After leaving the priesthood in 1974, he worked in hospital
social work, following a career in the NHS until he found himself commissioning
HIV services in London. Since taking early retirement he has continued working
in HIV, sexual health and drug related sectors as a consultant and trainer.
The early days
Looking back on the 1980s, Martin said he had the impression Catholics were
disproportionately affected by HIV.
“We had no hard data for this; it was a gut feeling that Catholics were
over represented in a number of marginalised situations: prison, drug use,
etc.”
At that time in London, he says, many professionals involved with HIV were
Catholic, and many were seeing friends as well as clients diagnosed and ultimately
die of the Aids epidemic. The response was the creation of Catholic Aids Link,
which ran until 1997.
“It was well recognised by the church as doing good stuff,” says
Martin, “but by then new therapies were making inroads to peoples’
life expectancy and some at the Link took on board the media’s take
that Aids was over.”
“Some of us thought that was a real mistake,” he continues. “We
felt there still needed to be a Catholic presence; both a voice in the church,
enabling positive people to be heard, but also to be a more open, critical
and questioning voice within the wider HIV community.“So often in our
pastoral contact, people are saying it is difficult to integrate issues of
religious faith, Catholic practice and the realities of HIV.”
This led to the creation of CAPS and later Positive Catholics, a group of
gays and heterosexuals drawn from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. This
month they will meet for a weekend at a historic Benedictine abbey in the
West of England to celebrate their diversity. Supported by one of the abbey’s
monks and a London-based priest, it will be a time for prayer, reflection
and laughter.
On a more significant note, CAPS recently persuaded the religious order to
ditch plans for HIV testing for all prospective candidates. “We held
a workshop with them to help establish their policy. We said, ‘if you
are going to do this, these are the consequences; you have to be upfront about
the testing and not use it to turn away gay candidates’. At the end
of the day they took an informed decision not to introduce the testing.”
Tolerant and tolerated
CAPS has staged two conferences at Westminster Cathedral’s Vaughan House,
which involved mainly people with a Catholic background living with HIV.
“We wanted to look at the reality of peoples’ needs, what resources
were in the church to meet them and to develop a pastoral plan to deliver
to the bishops of England and Wales,” says Martin.
The reaction from the church authorities was largely positive. CAPS works
closely with CAFAM, a Westminster diocesan ministry based at Covent Garden’s
Corpus Christi church, and meets at the Roman Catholic church of the Assumption
in London. Meanwhile, the Lesbian and Gay Catholic Caucus use the Anglican
church of St. Anne’s for masses. Not in itself unusual, says Martin,
as a number of churches are now used ecumenically, but he admits the mass
has caused controversy.
The official church response amounts to a classic case of compromise. It can’t
approve or affirm the gay and lesbian masses, because the caucus is in open
dissent with the Vatican. But, says Martin, the masses, held on the first
and third Sunday of the month, are said by a rota of well respected priests.
These have included the likes of Timothy Radcliffe, Master General of the
Dominican Order and tipped as a candidate for a cardinal’s post. Even
the late Cardinal Basil Hume risked Vatican censure by articulating publicly
the personal, and compassionate support that priests and bishops gave gay
people, albeit subtly, for many years.
The question everyone asks
Martin acknowledges that people who identify as gay and catholic have attracted
occasional hostility from some parts of the gay community. This hostility
has arisen, not surprisingly, from the Vatican’s stubborn stance over
condom use, even when used to protect against HIV transmission. And then,
of course, there is its outright condemnation of ‘practising’
homosexuality. On the other hand, Martin points to the enormous interests
shown in CAPS, Positive Catholics and the GL Caucus when it took part in Gay
Pride. “The Sunday after Pride we had a huge number attending. But we
always have people coming by asking, ‘how can you be Catholic?’”
This question is currently exercising the mind of a number of eminent Catholic
theologians. Martin points to the work of Father Enda McDonagh, a retired
moral theologian at Maynooth College, Ireland, and an adviser to CAFOD.McDonagh
has previously written: “The witness of remarkable loving care which
some gay men have shown to their partners and friends with Aids/HIV should
be recognised as of moral and Christian significance. Such education, which
is coming mainly from the front lines of the Aids and HIV crisis, has yet
to interact with the directors of Catholic education.”
Condomania
At the very heart of the problem is the Roman Catholic church’s official
policy on contraception. From its Humanae Vitae laws on the sanctity of human
life spring issues around marriage, sexuality, contraception and abortion.
The Roman Catholic church opposes any kind of contraception because it claims
it breaks the link between sex and procreation; a position endorsed by John
Paul II, and the new pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI. These laws are not fundamental
doctrine but were drawn up by Pope Paul VI in the 1970s, long before the Aids
epidemic, and could, in theory, be modified by future popes. In what appeared
like a desperate bid to turn people away from condoms, in 2003 the Vatican
told people in Aids-stricken countries not to use
them as tiny holes in the latex allowed the virus to pass through. In Europe,
and many other places besides, it is abundantly clear Catholics regularly
break or ignore the Humane Vitae rules. How else could devoutly Catholic
countries like Italy and Ireland be currently experiencing birth rates far
lower than its non-Catholic neighbours?
But it is in Africa where thousands needlessly die daily from Aids that the
Roman Catholic Humanae Vitae laws have come in for greatest criticism. A recent
BBC TV series, Absolute Truth: the Catholic Church in the World Today interviewed
Sister Leonia, a Polish-born Catholic nun working in Zambia, where two million
people are HIV positive.
Sister Leonia’s survey of the first 100 patients at her clinic with
complaints found a staggering 93 were HIV positive. She told the BBC journalist:
“Only someone very far away from the problem could say ‘never’.
If someone asks me about condoms, I say ‘if you can’t abstain
then it is better for you, your partner and your family to use a condom’.”
More than its head
Many Aids campaigners took a sharp intake of breath at the appointment of
the new pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI. As a cardinal, Pope Benedict took an inflexible
line on condom use. But closer to home, Cardinal of England and Wales Cormac
Murphy-O’Connor, among others in the church, have expressed doubts that
using condoms to prevent onward transmission of HIV should be viewed in the
same way as condoms used for contraceptive purposes. Martin believes the Roman
Catholic church itself allows for such flexibility.
“In Catholic teaching there is something called ‘the rights of
primacy on conscience’. The line we take at CAPS is that when reaching
any decision, whether social or personal, you have to take into account all
the facts, not just the facts you want to draw in, because it suits your particular
view point. The Vatican are increasingly bringing in facts that just suit
their argument; crazy things like how much sperm can escape through a latex
condom; it’s nonsense. “Our line, whether in CAPS or the Lesbian
and Gay Caucus, is that in reaching moral decisions as Catholics you respect
the tradition of the church and listen to what its leaders are
saying, but at the end of the day you have to reach those decisions yourself.
I think it was Cardinal Newman who said, ‘conscience is a sacred place
where people meet God’.”
Recently, Catholic writer Christine Odone, barred from taking mass because
she is married to a divorced Anglican, wrote that she felt ‘out of synch’
with the church. But after studying the leaflets, posters and
messages at the back of Westminster Cathedral (priests offering divorced Catholics
communion; special masses for gay and lesbian Catholics;
post-abortion counselling) she concluded: “Papal doctrine may be inflexible,
but the pastoral care is humane and far reaching. The church is so much more
than its head.”
• Catholics for Aids Prevention
and Support (CAPS), PO Box 24632, London E9 6XF
• Positive Catholics meet at a central London Catholic venue on the
third Saturday of every month from 2-5pm. To join or find out more, write
to positivecatholics@btinternet.com
The boycott that bellyflopped
The
Catholic Agency For Overseas Development (CAFOD) is part of growing up Catholic.
It collects almost £30 million each year in England and Wales. Estimates
suggest that Catholic agencies throughout the world provide care for a quarter
of all people with Aids in sub-Saharan Africa. But despite these good works,
the UK’s lead Catholic agency on HIV issues was last year subjected
to a vicious campaign and
boycott orchestrated by the shadowy Catholic Action Group (CAG).
The seeds of the boycott were sown in 2001 when Martin Pendergast and his
partner Julian Filochowski, then director of CAFOD, held a celebratory mass
after 25 years together. Guests included Bishop John Crowley, another CAFOD
director. An outraged Daily Telegraph ran the headline: ‘Bishop to Give
Sermon at Gay Thanksgiving’.
Forces of reaction were at work behind the scenes. Then Telegraph publisher
Conrad Black owned the Catholic Herald and had close links to fundamentalist
groups.
“The right wing really kicked in and CAG started an email campaign,”
says Martin. “One phrase they used was ‘charity funds gay champagne
breakfast’. It was completely misguided.” It was clear CAG were
gunning for CAFOD and Martin and the opportunity presented itself when CAFOD
published its HIV prevention policy in 2004. The policy stated: “That
correctly used, good quality condoms provide protection again the
transmission of HIV, reducing the risk of infection, though not removing it
completely.” It also said it recognised that for the
majority of people, decisions about sexual behaviour were constrained by economic,
legal and gender-related powerlessness.
The response was extreme. The Daily Telegraph screamed: ‘Catholics Back
Aids Condoms’ and quoted CAG calls for CAFOD heads on platters. CAG
also emailed 700 Catholic priests throughout England and Wales urging a CAFOD
boycott and branding Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor ‘a rationalising
disobedient prelate... indistinguishable from so many secular siren voices
espousing the same prophylactic propaganda’. Their website declared:
‘Giving to CAFOD is a sin.’
But the UK church stood firm. The country’s largest Catholic newspaper
The Universe refused to run a CAG advert calling for a boycott. And the Catholic
bishops in England wrote to every parish priest urging them to ignore the
campaign and to embrace ‘CAFOD’s considered position on HIV prevention,
developed from its 20 years involvement of working with people with HIV and
Aids’. The boycott belly-flopped. Bemoaning its failure, CAG said: “Not
a single bishop raised so much as a quizzical eyebrow over the faith-shattering
Filochowski-Pendergast affair - a smoking gun they had happily condoned for
years.”
Don McGovern, of Christian Order, an affiliate of CAG, told PN the anti-CAFOD
campaign would continue, but they were now concentrating on ‘mixed religion’
schools and exposing Catholic priests who interpreted the liturgy in their
own way and who failed to wear the correct vestments during mass. McGovern
said he was a recent convert to ‘orthodox’ Catholicism,’
a select grouping of some 10,000 people out of the million or more practising
Catholics in England and Wales. The other 990,000 practising Catholics he
declared were ‘modernists and liberals.’
