News
2007-02-10
Catholic Church
slams free Brazil Carnival condoms
Catholic bishops
criticized on Friday Brazil's plan to hand out millions
of free condoms in the world's largest Catholic country when
Catholic bishops
criticized on Friday Brazil's plan to hand out millions
of free condoms in the world's largest Catholic country when
its famously bacchanalian Carnival begins next week.
The health
ministry will roll out a new marketing campaign for safe sex
on Sunday in Rio de Janeiro and start giving away 35 million
free condoms in the streets for Carnival, a festival
celebrated by Catholics the world over before the
strict period of Lent.
With 150 million
Catholics, Brazil has a carnival that is a five-day
street party legendary for liberal amounts of dancing,
drinking, and sex.
"Is this going to
help? I don't think so," Cardinal Geraldo Majella,
president of Brazil's Catholic Bishops Council, told
journalists in Brasilia on Friday.
After Carnival
ends this year, Pope Benedict XVI will make his first
visit to Brazil in May.
The free Carnival
condoms are meant to help prevent the spread of
sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS after Brazil slowed
transmission rates by giving out condoms in past
years.
But the church is
against birth control and preaches abstinence from sex
before marriage.
It has long
questioned Brazil's safe-sex program, which has made condoms
available for years in health centers and in some high
schools. The United Nations has praised the program as
a model for other developing countries.
In January the
government asked students to design a better vending
machine to widen distribution. The students with the best
idea will win $25,000, and test machines could hit
schools in 2008.
"Rules need to be
established. If this is the sex education they
want…on this we cannot agree," said Majella.
This year's
Carnival slogan is tipped to be: "With condoms, the good
feeling goes on after the party is over." (Reuters)
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