(crossposted from Crossandflame.com)
I heard this NPR report on Bishop Kevin Dowling the other day, and I was pretty surprised -- not that he was doing what he was doing, but that I hadn't heard of him before.
He's the Catholic Bishop of Rustenburg, South Africa, a poor mining town in the middle of one of the most AIDS-infected countries in the world.
His statements -- arguing that the Vatican's anti-condom stance is killing people in need -- have attracted a fair amount of media attention. He was named one of TimeEurope's Heroes 2005.
From that Time piece:
Four years ago, he became the first African bishop to call on the church to consider lifting its absolute ban on condom use. They should be accepted as a tool for protecting millions of vulnerable lives against aids, he argued, rather than denounced as a form of birth control. “The challenge to the church is a challenge to all of society,” says the 61-year-old bishop. “We have to find the best means to protect life, and the best means to prevent the transmission of this virus.”
Over the past seven years, Dowling has developed his initial makeshift clinic into a program that provides comprehensive treatment and counseling to hundreds of people a year. “He is the aids bishop,” says Father James Keenan, a professor of theological ethics at Boston College, Massachusetts. “The issue of the Catholic Church and condoms has to be resolved by listening to men of the church who have the experience, tenacity and wisdom of Bishop Dowling.”
So far, Pope Benedict has done little more than reiterate the Church's hardline anti-contraception stance. But Dowling says he thinks a lot of the clergymen in the field are quietly defying the hierarchy and starting to support condom programs in their clinics and among their congregations. My favorite line of his from the NPR interview: "I don't think I'll get promoted any time soon."
What I'm interested to see, though, is if there's any official order from the top for him to shut up. |
