PESTILENCE IN THE PRESBYTERY
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on the spread of Aids among priests in the United States Washington ARCHBISHOP Lanfranc warned against monks sharing towels, fearing that it was but a step to sodomy. The danger, it seems, has not abated over the centuries. Vincent Riveccio, a former Benedictine monk, told the Washington Post, 'You can't say from the time a person goes into a monastery until the day they die or leave that they're not going to have another sexual experience.' Riveccio is one of 12 priests and monks in the United States known to have Aids. Since many more are believed to be masking their illness the total could be more than 50, which means one priest in every thousand. For each Aids victim there are between 50 and 100 more already infected with the virus, half of whom may eventually succumb. That takes the ratio of infected priests up to a staggering five or ten per cent of America's Catholic clergy, suggesting that they may now be in a 'high risk' category of their own — well below intravenous drug users and San Francisco gays, but not so far below Haitians and prostitutes.
One vocation-director blames the high infection rate on the Church's 'negative' attitude towards priests struggling with their sexuality, forcing them to go under- ground and 'become involved with impul- sive behaviour' which is the most danger- ous form of• sex. He added that 'the average person in the pew would be shocked to learn that their priest is gay just as they'd be shocked that their doctor is gay.' This is not as grotesque as it sounds. America's pews are lined with liberals who treat promiscuity, like alcoholism, as a social and not a moral issue. Even so, it is hard to imagine that they cannot see the difference between the sacred vows of chastity and the Hippocratic oath.
The Offenders can expect little en- couragement from the Vatican. Last Octo- ber's pastoral letter by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that homosexuality is a 'more or less strong tendency towards an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder'. Those counten- ancing an 'Augustinian' sexual journey to the discovery of God are being silenced. Here WashingtOn, Father Robert Cur- ran, a lecturer in moral theology, lost his job after dissenting on abortion, masturba- tion, divorce and homosexuality. Last year Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, well known for refusing to pay taxes in protest against nuclear weapons, was disciplined after holding a gay Mass in his cathedral. The American bishops, a quarter of whom say they favour 'optional celibacy' for priests, have so far chosen not to use their economic clout to win greater licence for their clergy and congregations.
Instead it has been left to the weekly National Catholic Reporter to fight for a theology of sodomy. Disputing Cardinal Ratzinger's biblical evidence that homosexuality is a sin, one article points out that the city of Sodom was punished for its inhospitality, that is to say gang-raping visitors (Genesis xix, 1-11), and not for sexual preference. In any case, runs the defence, sodomites lusted after angels not men (Jude vi, 7), which is a different matter. As for St Paul's remark that arsenokotai won't enter the kingdom of God, does the word really mean gay, or is it just the ancient Greek for gigolo? Surprisingly, nobody yet seems to have resorted to the Gnostic gospels where Christ's celibacy was less certain. The gospel according to Mary Magdalen, for instance, or according to Christ's twin brother, Thomas, could both offer plenty of ammunition.
Meanwhile, in the lay community Aids has made a publicity breakthrough with warnings by the US Surgeon General, Everett Koop, that 100 million people will be infected worldwide over the next de- cade. The Soviet Union and Japan have both joined the panic wagon this month. Central Africa, where one in ten already carries the HIV virus, is about to be decimated. Not everybody is persuaded, however, that Burundi's Aids is spread primarily by heterosexual contact. Bad practices with needles, contaminated blood transfusions, and disguised homosexuality by married men, who then infect their wives, may still be the main cause. Mos- quitoes have been vindicated. American prisons, which are more popu- lous than Burundi, probably have a higher infection rate. Seven per cent of men and 14 per cent of women entering prison already carry the virus. Inside the cell blocks, where 'coerced' buggery and tat- tooing, somehow, with bed-springs are on the agenda, the figures are much higher. A prison sentence in the United States is becoming a death sentence, and surely infringes constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment.
In the country as a whole there have been 30,000 Aids victims and 1.5 million are thought to be infected, compared to only 40,000 in Britain. Some say the virus is spreading rapidly, exponentially, into the mainstream, and warn that 5 to 10 million Americans will be infected by 1991.
But figures collected by the New York City health department suggest nothing of the kind. Whereas the number of new cases doubled in 1983, it only went up 20 per cent in 1986, meaning the curve is getting flatter, not steeper. Only 3 per cent of the current patients, broadly classified as heterosexuals, do not belong to the high- risk groups. The health department says it believes most of this 3 per cent fraction actually belong to high-risk groups but deny it. Of the remaining handful, two- thirds are black and Hispanic heterosex- uals who live in ghetto areas where in- travenous drug use is rife.
Few Spectator readers or their American cousins are in much danger yet, though their teenage children might be if they mix in drug circles. There is cause for neither complacency nor panic. California's Prop- osition 64, put forward by Lyndon LaRouche and defeated in a referendum by two to one, would have fallen little short of branding Aids across the foreheads of carriers and consigning them to death camps.
A joint committee of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine has concluded that mandatory testing would not only be poisonous in a free society but could not possibly be enforced anyway. Besides, antibodies to the HIV virus cannot be found in the blood during the first few months after infection, so the Eliza blood test, dodgy at the best of times, can create a false sense of security. Instead the committee calls for a billion dollars a year of research money, and a further billion for public education.
The drive has begun with television advertisements for safer-sex condoms.
Most stations which sell soft porn every afternoon in their soap operas have shrunk from carrying a short slot that ends with a distraught girl saying 'I'd do a lot for love, but I'm not willing to die for it.' The word love was badly chosen for it should have been sex: but that would never get on the air. This misplaced prudery is what Marx might have called a 'contradiction of capi- talism', where the system has the seeds of its own destruction within it.
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