Any church statement to do with sexuality will lead commentators to pick through its entrails for signs. Pope Benedict's remarks on condoms have offered particularly rich pickings. Speculation immediately arose whether his statement might apply to married couples where one partner has AIDS, and whether indeed it heralds the collapse of Catholic condemnation of contraception.
In my view the Pope's words were less significant for their content than for their style. He engaged in a conversation about moral values that did not confine itself to principles, but entered the circumstances of human lives. This style of conversation has been lacking in the public statements of the contemporary Catholic Church.
In Catholic reflection on what matters in human life and how it is to be lived, there have been two kinds of conversation.
The first is an abstract conversation about values. In Catholic teaching on sexuality, sexual expression speaks the language of love, and sexual intercourse is tied to marriage. It should also be open to the possibility of passing on life. In that understanding of sexuality and its association with love and respect, condoms have no place.
This is an extraordinarily high ideal. It demands and generates a parallel conversation. This pastoral conversation engages with people who wish to live well, but whose weaknesses, situation or understanding hold them from embodying fully the values commended by Catholic teaching.
This conversation has been typically conducted in Confession and in spiritual direction. People could relate the large principles of Catholic moral teaching to the reality of their lives and to their individual spiritual journeys. It kept their faith in play.
The challenge has always been to bridge these conversations and to ensure that there is consistency between Christian values and the advice that was given to people, and that God's work in the lives of sinful people received proper respect.
This was done in part by looking carefully at the situations in which people found themselves, and partly by recognising that in human lives the less bad was often a step towards the good. For a meths drinker the decision to choose to wipe himself out on port instead can represent a huge growth in self respect.
In recent years, many sections of the Catholic world, including the Vatican, have felt that the moral values upheld in Catholic teaching, particularly those to do with sexuality and with the value of human life, are under threat in Western cultures. They believe that any accommodation to difficult situations will be seized on in order to attack the values.
So the pastoral conversation has been neglected in favour of a strong assertion of moral principle, whether the principle bear on the use of condoms in dealing with AIDS or on the prolongation of life. This relative neglect of the pastoral conversation has given the impression that the Church cares for abstract morality more than for people. It has also made it more difficult to commend the Christian vision of life.
The interview with Pope Benedict was significant because in it he modelled a pastoral conversation that dealt creatively with the situation and the personal journey of ordinary human beings.
He engaged with the case of a male prostitute affected by AIDS who chooses to use a condom. He said, it 'can be a first step in the direction of moralisation, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants'.
He recognised that in the intention of reducing infection there can be 'a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality'.
The Pope here recognised the importance of the prostitute's intention in evaluating his action. He also recognised that this action needed to be set in the context of a moral journey in which even an ambiguous action can have a positive significance.
From this perspective, the Pope's words certainly do not adumbrate a general approval of condoms. They reinforce the priority of the moral dimension in human life. Their real significance is to recognise the reality that God calls each person on a unique moral journey which will include weakness and sinfulness, and which will sometimes face them with difficult moral situations.
They reveal the importance of recovering a pastoral as well as a theoretical moral language to speak encouragingly of this journey.
Andrew Hamilton is the consulting editor for Eureka Street. He teaches at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne.