from: Ouko joachim omolo
The News Dispatch with Omolo Beste in images
SUNDAY, MAY 26, 2013
A caller was so worried yesterday after reading the article by Fr Gabriel Dolan on the use of condoms. He wondered whether the Kenya Episcopal Conference would spare when he expressed his opinion that condoms can be used to prevent life-threatening HIV transmission when one partner is positive while the other is negative.
I do not think the bishops will have a major issue with him since the bishop who welcomed him in his diocese is of the same opinion. Mombassa Archbishop Boniface Lele holds that couples can use to condoms when one is negative while the other is positive.
http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/topics/hivaids/bishopssupportcondoms.asp
Furthermore, Fr Dolan is not the first cleric to endorse the use of condoms to prevent life-threatening HIV transmission. In February 2005 a Vatican Cardinal was the latest church official – the most senior so far – to endorse the use of condoms to prevent life-threatening HIV transmission, as the debate on the issue continues to rage around the world. The Tablet – Vatican cardinal breaks ranks over condoms.
https://thetablet.co.uk/article/1666
Cardinal Georges Cottier, the theologian of the papal household, told the Italian news agency Apcom that the use of condoms was ‘legitimate’ to save lives in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia where the Aids pandemic has been catastrophic. He argued that condoms should be tolerated as a ‘lesser evil’ in instances where the ideals of abstinence and fidelity are simply not realistic.
Cardinal Godfried Danneels, Archbishop of Brussels, and Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenburg, South Africa, are among several church leaders who have voiced their support for the use of condoms to limit the spread of Aids.
Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, who chairs the Pontifical Council for Health, recently appeared to recognise the right of a spouse whose husband has HIV/Aids to demand that he use a condom, according to a report by the Italian daily La Repubblica.
This is similar opinion like that of Lele who is convinced when faced with the prospect of families being wiped out by an infected spouse infecting their partner, a condom could be a life-saver.
According to yesterday’s article run by Saturday Nation entitled: Churches have abandoned Social Justice Fr Dolan argued that while our religious leaders may well be right about condoms, married couples make choices of their own and he will not condemn them.
This is not only because morality is all about making informed decisions and taking responsibility for our actions, because Jesus came to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable but churches today worship power and preaches a prosperity gospel.
He also warns us not to judge. The only time he is angry and judgmental himself is on the subject of the poor in Mt 25. He condemned religious leaders of his day for laying heavy burdens on the shoulders of the common folk and not lifting a finger to remove them (Mt 23).
According to Fr Dolan, instead of bishops using much of their time discussing about the use of condoms they should discuss how to assist 18 million Kenyans living on less than Sh100 a day. This is how they are going to be judged according to Matthew 25.
We will be judged by how we treated ‘the least of these’ brothers and sisters of Jesus. Our church leaders will be judged how they viewed IDPs, slum dwellers, people with HIV, albinos, autistic children, widows and orphans and every other forgotten sector of society as our own kith and kin because when we ignore them we reject the divinity and dignity present in each of them.
Fr Dolan instead expected the bishops to join Rev Timothy Njoya who was the only religious leader involved in protesting the greed of the latest bunch of parliamentarians. This is because authentic religion is about mercy and challenging unjust systems and laws that shackle the marginalised in our midst.
That is also why, like Njoya Jesus would have cleansed Parliament with a whip like he cleansed the temple of money dealers two millennia ago. In the Day of Judgment God will ask what each person did to help the poor and needy: “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”
The poor have the most urgent moral claim on the conscience of the nation. People are called to look at public policy decisions in terms of how they affect the poor. As church leaders we need to discuss and involve topics such as affordable access to health care, especially for low income households and families.
As church leaders we do not want lay people to rate us as worse than our MPs who instead of giving service to their electorates they discuss how much money they should earn. We do not want them to look at us greedy leaders whose objectives are not only limited to money and earthly pleasures but leadership and power.
We do not want to create an environment where lay people look at us as if we are the only ones who are always right in the name of Jesus while we remain secret sinners covered with the name of Jesus by giving them heavy burdens that we cannot be able to carry by ourselves.
We do not want people we serve to suffer under us because they have nowhere to take their complains when they think we have offended them. In this way they will remain traumatised forever. Their consolation is only that in heaven no different from lay person and religious leader.
Social justice rightly understood is a specific habit of justice that is “social” in two senses. First, the skills it requires are those of inspiring, working with, and organizing others to accomplish together a work of justice.
These are the elementary skills of civil society, through which free citizens exercise self–government by doing for themselves (that is, without turning to government) what needs to be done.
Although in the church structure there is no civil society, there are some incidences where the faithful have protested against their church leaders, like what happened in Yei diocese in South Sudan in 1980s and recent one in Nigeria where faithful protested against the installation of Bishop Peter Ebere Okpaleke as the bishops of the diocese of Ahiara.
Despite protests from the local Christians who wanted one of their own appointed, Bishop Okpaleke formerly a priest of the Awka diocese was installed on May 21, 20 13 under high security outside his new diocese, at Seat of Wisdom Seminary in Ulakwo, in the Archdiocese of Owerri due to the strong opposition among the local Mbaise community.
The Mbaise are a tribe of the Igbo, one of the three major ethnic groups of Nigeria. Most Christians in Nigeria are Igbo, and reside in the south-east of the country.
The first time I met Fr Gabriel Dolan was in November 2003 when he and three human rights activists were arrested and put in Kitale police custody for obstructing the Vice-President’s motorcade.
The four were protesting against landgrabbing. They wanted to present a memorandum on land grabbing to the vice-president Moody Awori as he visited the Kitale prison. The Government subsequently agreed to investigate how the land in question was allocated to senior government officials and both in the past and the current Governments in vain. This is because the ‘untouchables’ were involved. Fr Dolan was released after an order from Vice-President.
Although Emeritus Nairobi Archbishop Ndingi Mwana a’Nzeki was angry with Fr Dolan, arguing that he would have not protested before consulting with the hierarchy before undertaking the protest, Fr Dolan received widespread support from other church leaders and the Catholic faithful, peaceful demonstrations, including the Kenya Episcopal Conference who came to his defense by saying that he had the right to meet Vice-President Moody Awori over the grabbed Kitale Prison land.
“Kenya is now a free society. It is clear to the KEC that Fr Dolan had every right to peacefully meet the Vice-President, whose ministerial docket includes the prisons,” the chairman, the Right Rev Cornelius Korir argued.
But this of course did not make his nice ending. He lost his right to fight for the rights of voiceless in Kitale- came back to Nairobi with a mission to begin a justice and peace centre to no success since Ndingi was still the Nairobi Archbishop. He was eventually received by Archbishop Boniface Lele of Mombasa to work with him where he is to date.
Fr Joachim Omolo Ouko, AJ
Tel +254 7350 14559/+254 722 623 578
E-mail omolo.ouko@gmail.com
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Real change must come from ordinary people who refuse to be taken hostage by the weapons of politicians in the face of inequality, racism and oppression, but march together towards a clear and unambiguous goal.
-Anne Montgomery, RSCJ UN Disarmament Conference, 2002