Cardinal López Trujillo announces new document that will address so-called “safe sex”

Bogotá, Colombia, Jan 22, 2004 / 22:00 pm

In comments made to Columbian media outlets, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, reiterated that condoms do not help to prevent AIDS, and he announced that his dicastery has published a new 44-page document addressed to health officials with information concerning the myth of “safe sex.”

The Columbian Cardinal said the document calls on ministers of health from around the world to require warning labels on condom packaging which states that “condoms do not totally protect against AIDS.”

He added that the document would be sent to the World Health Organization so that the necessary means will be adopted “to protect humanity.”

The Cardinal revealed that certain countries are considering taking the measure as a reaction to the fact that “the world is under a shrewd and determined anti-conception campaign”

The document entitled, “The Values of the Family versus Safe Sex,” was drafted at the request of Pope John Paul II, and “ responds to various doubts and to biased and superficial information that indicates the problem continues to exist.”

“So-called ‘safe sex’ does not exists, and current campaigns get children and young people in schools involved in a rash and dishonest fashion,” said the Cardinal, adding that such campaigns encourage “promiscuity, especially in young people,” who are falsely told that “there is a such a thing as ‘safe sex,’ that nothing will happen to them.”

Cardinal Trujillo rejected programs that provide for wide distribution of condoms among young people, and he pointed to the decision by the mayor’s office of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) to reject a proposal to send condoms by mail to women who request them.

“That is a deceitful and superficial way of addressing the problem, and more so when it comes to the myth of overpopulation--acknowledged today even by the United Nations-- a myth full of lies to get people to believe it, but in the end never came to be because people had different standards and expectations.”

The Cardinal concluded by saying that someday he hoped to “tell what goes on at the UN regarding the myth of overpopulation, which has very much to do with the issue of condoms, because they believe it will also reduce the population and not only address the problem of AIDS.”