VATICAN FEARS SCANDAL MORE THAN DEATH

Rome has decided a heroin trial would fail and delivers this verdict
without citing a line of science, writes David Marr.

For a couple of thousand years Christians have boasted the moral courage to
pursue their mission in the face of popular misunderstanding. The verdict
of the hoi poloi has been a matter of magnificent indifference for
believers. Christians have soldiered on through the centuries confident
that by example and preaching they will convert their opponents to the Truth.

Rome isn't thinking quite that way these days. Not when the subject is
heroin. At the heart of Rome's recent decision to ban Sydney's Sisters of
Charity from taking part in medically supervised heroin injecting rooms is
the fear of "scandal". The Sisters run St Vincent's Hospital in the heart
of the Darlinghurst drug belt but the impact of the ban issued by the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith will be felt worldwide.

"One of the most important bad side effects to this proposed service is
scandal, which the Sisters of Charity are aware of and would take serious
measures to address," the congregation stated. "Nevertheless, precisely
because of the extreme proximity of the co-operation of a Catholic
institution in a serious evil some people will be scandalised; it will seem
to them to be formal co-operation."

Those italics are Rome's. Where the issue involves the "serious evil" of
heroin addiction, the church has said it will pay heed to "scandal" even
where that scandal is based on misunderstanding and ignorance. It's a long
moral distance from Catholicism's usual claim to stand bravely, come what
may, for its idea of Truth.

Right now there are other scandals Rome might worry more about. There's the
scandal of losing even a single life that need not be lost to heroin. Or
there's the scandal of contradicting its own bishops and health authorities
who even a year ago were enthusiastically backing the plans of the Sisters
of Charity. Their endorsements filled pages of The Catholic Weekly last August.

"The aim is to rehabilitate people and that is essential," wrote Bishop Pat
Power, secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference Committee
for the Family and for Life. "I do not believe that this is giving the
wrong signal to society because it is being run by highly responsible
people. I see it as being justified in the same way that the methadone
program is."

Catholic Health Australia gave its complete backing. "People marginalised
by the vicious cycle of dependence must be given practical assistance by
the Church," wrote its director, Francis Sullivan. "The mission of Catholic
health is always to support the promise of life to the full for everybody."

St James Ethics Centre's executive director, Dr Simon Longstaff, declared
that the Sisters' decision was "in complete accordance with the Catholic
Church's theological teachings and was in line with traditional, moral,
theological ethics".

Even Father Brian Lucas, the extremely careful spokesman for the Sydney
Archdiocese, said, while warning of possible controversy ahead, that the
Sisters' plans to run the injecting room were "not inconsistent with
Catholic moral teaching".

Well, they've all been declared wrong by Rome.

The tone of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith's verdict is
chilling. Here and there the theologians talk about the chance of saving
lives, but the real focus of their six-page "Moral Evaluation" is the evils
of addiction. In terms of the drugs war, this is a brutally hard line. The
document could as easily have been drafted in Clinton's Washington or the
Vienna of the UN drug agencies as in Rome. Without producing any evidence
at all, the congregation dismisses the likelihood that medically supervised
injecting rooms save lives: "The benefits of similar services in other
countries ... are at least dubious and debatable." True, such claims are
controversial. That's why Australia wants to conduct trials of its own.
Finding out was what the Sisters wanted to do. But Rome has decided a trial
would almost certainly fail and delivers this damning verdict without
citing a line of science.

Worse is Rome's appalling claim that "harm" is merely "accidental" to drug
injection. Accidental? Deaths are running at about 1,000 a year in
Australia. Tell ambulance officers in Cabramatta that any connection
between filling your veins with heroin and sudden death is merely
accidental and those witnesses of real life in the gutters of the real
world would question your sanity.

But that is the verdict of Rome's theological watchdogs: the church should
keep clear of safe injecting rooms because harm is "accidental" while
addiction is "essential and necessarily connected to the evil of drug
abuse". The evil that matters most to the church here is addiction defined
by the theologians thus: "the loss of the status as free and responsible
moral agents, proper to man, and the progressive destruction of life and
health".

Not "progressive". Heroin kills swiftly. Cigarettes and alcohol and heroin
are all dangerous addictive drugs. The first two kill slowly. But all of
the fine moral principles worked out to help addicts get off booze and fags
have to be adjusted in the face of heroin's particular danger: sudden,
random death. This is something the Sisters of Charity know in Darlinghurst
but it's yet to penetrate the moral intelligences of the Congregation of
the Doctrine of the Faith. Put simply: a dead addict is beyond help.

Catholic health authorities have already begun the long, very Catholic
process of pretending in public to agree with Rome's ban while working hard
in private to make the authorities over there see sense. What worries them
particularly is that Rome's antiseptic attitude to addicts puts in doubt
the role of church health services in methadone programs and needle exchange.

The same Catholic women who wanted to see if lives might be saved by a
supervised injecting room were world pioneers of needle exchange. The
Sisters of Charity in Darlinghurst showed that giving clean needles to
addicts keeps them, their partners and their children alive. But Australia
looks now to be the testing ground of a rather different Catholic
experiment: to see whether reactionary groups within church ranks can force
the church's own health services to abandon "harm minimisation" policies
admired and copied around the world - for the scandal of saving lives.