Philippine health chief, church fight over condoms

The message was clear in a country with a relatively small but rapidly growing HIV-positive population: Avoid unprotected sex.

It didn't get far. Within days, leaders of the powerful Roman Catholic Church began urging the faithful to reject condoms, reigniting a long-running battle over contraception in the overwhelmingly Catholic nation .

Bishops issued angry statements slamming the Valentine's Day distribution as immoral and called for the resignation of Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral, who ordered the campaign. One archbishop said that Cabral already "has one foot in hell."

The bishops called for a ban on condom advertisements last week.

"The condom business is a multimillion dollar industry that heavily targets the adolescent market at the expense of morality and family life," said Bishop Nereo Odchimar, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines. He called fidelity and premarital chastity "the only effective way to curb the spread of AIDS."

On Monday, about 100 people protested against the church's position, carrying two baskets of inflated condoms and paper roses as they picketed outside the Bishops' Conference building in downtown Manila. They held a placard reading, "Bless our reproductive right."

The Catholic church is a powerful voice in a nation beset with poverty and political instability. Politicians court bishops' blessings and usually tiptoe around issues such as promoting contraception.

The bishops mobilized protests that toppled late dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and President Joseph Estrada in 2001 on corruption allegations.

More recently, the church has spearheaded opposition to a reproductive health bill that calls for contraceptives to be provided in government hospitals and sex education to be taught in public schools. The bill is languishing in the House of Representatives.

Cabral, the health secretary, said she doesn't take the church's word lightly. "They are very powerful and they can sometimes be vicious," she said.

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