Bishop bucks the Vatican in HIV battle.

Byline: Laurie Goering

PHOKENG, South Africa _ When the women of Freedom Park squatter camp die during the wet season, their emaciated bodies must be carried out by hand through the oozing black mud, past the rusting tin shacks and open sewers and scrubby trees covered in windblown trash, to the nearest road for a pauper's funeral.

The camp, close by the region's platinum mines and mine hostels, has no electricity, no water and few jobs, apart from prostitution. What it has in abundance is poverty and sex and AIDS and death.

Bishop Kevin Dowling will never forget ducking into the hut of a skeletal young mother with AIDS on one of his first visits to the settlement.

"She looked in my eyes and said, `There is no hope for me, Father. I have no hope,' and tears started running down," recalls the lanky, 61-year-old priest. "I looked around the house, and there wasn't a stitch of food."

The Catholic Church bans the use of condoms but Dowling believes the prophylactics _ at least in his diocese _ are a key to saving lives.

Abstinence and faithfulness in marriage, the church's answer to the AIDS epidemic, "are the only way to be sure you won't get infected. I have no problem with that," the controversial South African bishop admits. But in his diocese, full of desperately poor women with few options beyond prostitution to feed their children, using condoms seems to him "a pro-life option in the widest sense."

…