Aids Ruckus In the Vatican

! Normally, international conferences at the Vatican are carefully staged and well modulated. Such was the expectation last week as 1,000 theologians, church officials, health workers and top-flight scientists gathered in Rome for the first Vatican meeting on AIDS. But the script was quickly ripped up as the three-day conference was disrupted by a sign-wielding protester, dissident caucuses and angry charges and countercharges. At one point the conference's organizer, Archbishop Fiorenzo Angelini, had a tense confrontation with an AIDS victim who had sought to speak to the group.

Calm had returned by the time Pope John Paul II appeared. In the first major papal statement on AIDS, the Pontiff called on governments "to develop and carry out a worldwide plan to combat AIDS and drug addiction." He urged patients not to despair and condemned "every form of discrimination" against them. But he warned against "morally illicit" methods of preventing AIDS -- a clear allusion to condoms -- and spoke of "abuse of sexuality," referring to homosexuality, as a cause of the spreading of AIDS. He said the crisis results from "immunodeficiency" in values.

The conference's trouble began after the sponsoring Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers refused to allow a speech by militant Peter Larkin of England, one of several AIDS sufferers who were invited by the Vatican. Frustrated by the council's tight control of the agenda, some 50 dissidents accused it of hindering open discussions, then set up their own lunch-hour conference. On the sidelines, some medical professionals defended the use of condoms; others accused the church of homophobia. John White, a priest who contracted the virus while in Kenya and now runs an AIDS treatment center in London, was ejected from one conference session for wearing a sandwich board that read THE CHURCH HAS AIDS. Declared one participant from the U.S.: "This is the worst conference I've ever attended."

The meeting strengthened Roman Catholic officialdom's stand against advocating condom use for homosexuals or distribution of sterile needles to drug addicts, particularly in a tough opening speech by New York's John Cardinal O'Connor. Father Rocco Buttiglione of Liechtenstein's International Academy of Philosophy went so far as to suggest that the AIDS scourge could be a "divine punishment," but quickly added that it was aimed not just at sexual misconduct but at all modern forms of sinfulness. The various flare-ups tended to obscure the repeated theme on which everyone at the conference agreed: AIDS is a horrendous health crisis that demands every bit of compassion and care the church can muster.