During a weeklong visit to Africa in March, Pope Benedict XVI told journalists accompanying him on the papal plane to Cameroon that making condoms widely available “increased the problem” of AIDS. The remark, similar to the Vatican’s longstanding emphasis on sexual abstinence, revived controversy over how best to stem the global AIDS epidemic that has devastated sub-Saharan Africa.
The supervisor of New York congregations for the United Church of Christ has been nominated to become the denomination’s next general minister and president. Geoffrey Black is expected to be presented to the UCC General Synod this summer as successor to John H. Thomas, who has served since 1999 and is not eligible for reelection. Black is particularly concerned about equal justice and black empowerment and cofounded the Amistad Cultural Center of Long Island, according to a church announcement. He would be the UCC’s second African-American president.
Bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have joined African religious leaders in publicly undergoing testing to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS and to end a legacy of church stigma and silence on the subject. “We in the U.S. tend to think of this as a global pandemic unrelated to people in the United States,” Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the ELCA, said March 5 at the church’s Chicago headquarters. “For me as a married heterosexual man to be tested is a reminder that all communities are affected, if not infected.”