MONTREAL — Montreal's Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte fielded questions from reporters on the news that the city's Grand Seminaire would be performing HIV tests on applicants. “For us, HIV is a disease like any other, but it's a very serious disease,” he said. “The question is not whether he is homosexual. It is whether or not he has an active sexuality. Whether it is hetero or homo, it's the same thing. To live in celibacy you cannot have an active sexuality.”
The Cardinal compared discovery of HIV infection to discovery of any other serious health problem. “It's not only a job we take for a few months or a few years. It's a state of life,” he said.
Cardinal Turcotte also suggested the testing has nothing to do with the sexual abuse scandals involving priests. “HIV has nothing to do with pedophilia,” he said.
See also:
Cardinal Skates Around HIV Tests for Seminarians
Also, Contrary to Catholic Teaching Belgian Cardinal Advocates Use of Condoms to Fight AIDS
BRUSSELS — Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, 70, the left-leaning media favorite to become the next pope, has unleashed another firestorm by publicly advocating the use of condoms as protection from HIV/AIDS. “When someone is seropositive and his partner says, 'I want to have sexual relations with you' — he doesn't have to do that, if you ask me — but when he does, he has to use a condom…,” said Daneels in a radio interview Sunday.
Speaking on the Kruispunt programme of Dutch Catholic broadcaster RKK, Daneels said, “This (the use of condoms) comes down to protecting yourself in a preventive manner against a disease or death; (it) cannot be entirely morally judged in the same manner as a pure way of birth limitation.”
The interview marks the second time in the last few months the cardinal has publicly stirred controversy over condoms. In October, Daneels held a press conference at his residence in which he publicly belittled fellow Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo. Trujillo, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, repeated the Church's teaching against contraception to a BBC program, and also noted the scientific evidence showing that condoms are not fail-safe protection against AIDS. Cardinal Daneels, was quoted by Reuters saying of Cardinal Trujillo's comments, “I deplore that comment, the way it was received. It does not befit a cardinal to deal with the virtue of a product … I don't know if what he said is reliable.”
See also:
Belgian Cardinal Holds Press Conference to Slam Curial Cardinal over Statements Against Condoms
(This update courtesy of LifeSiteNews.com.)
