BRUSSELS, May 24, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Belgium’s outspoken left-liberal Cardinal has rebuked an anti-Catholic abortion organization for attempting to invoke his name to support their condom cause. In Late June, the militantly pro-abortion group, Catholics for a Free Choice, called on supporters to send letters thanking Godfried Cardinal Daneels for his comments last year supporting the use of condoms in AIDS prevention.
CFFC sent a letter to Daneels after his public dissent from the Catholic teaching, asking him to lead a campaign within the Church to force a change to the doctrine. Daneels, in what appears to be a post-conclave turn-around, called the effort to recruit him “deplorable.” He said that the only solution to the spread of AIDS is a “moral education that teaches chastity and fidelity to one’s husband or wife.”
Daneels, however, has never retracted or corrected his comments of January 2004 when he told Dutch Catholic broadcaster RKK, “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.”
Catholic teaching on the subject is clear, however, that both the use of artificial contraceptives and sexual relations outside lawful marriage are mortally sinful and cannot be endorsed by any representative of the Church. Though no public reprimand was made to Daneels’ assertion by the Vatican, Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, the head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, repeated the Church’s teaching. Daneels then insulted Trujillo in an Reuter’s interview for the latter’s stand upholding Catholic teaching.
Immediately following the election of Pope Benedict, many faithful Catholics speculated that those cardinals and bishops who publicly dissented from the teachings of their Church under John Paul II would shortly be changing their tunes on the ‘hot-button’ issues popular with leftist, dissenting “Catholics” such as homosexuality, condoms for AIDS prevention and priestly celibacy. Mainstream media, for whom bishops like Daneels, and Los Angeles’ Cardinal Mahoney have been the darlings of their sexual revolution, went into a frenzy of denunciation at the choice of Ratzinger for pope, predicting it would spell the end of official toleration of dissent in the Catholic Church.
See related past LifeSiteNews.com story:
Contrary to Catholic Teaching Belgian Cardinal Advocates Use of Condoms to Fight AIDS