Two priests from the United States, Fathers Walter Schu and John Paul Duran, spoke to the audience of young people about the use of contraception and the ideas of love and abstinence.

"Contraception closes us off to the gift of giving life. With contraception, the body is not seen as something to take care of, but merely as an object," said Fr Duran.

"A love cannot be pure or true if it involves the use of contraception because contraception reduces the capacity to be a father or mother," he said.

Meanwhile on Tuesday, in New Zealand, the NZ cross-party parliamentarians' group called for stronger political support to improve the sexual and reproductive health of Pacific adolescents.

The committee callied for stronger collaboration between Pacific parliamentarians and sexual and reproductive health stakeholders to push for sexual and reproductive health and rights on national agendas.

The Committee's report says that adolescents in the Pacific suffer a disproportionate burden of poor sexual and reproductive health, reflected in the high rates of pregnancies, sexually transmissible infections and cases of gender-based violence among the 10-24 year age group.

Source

• The Fiji Times
• Pacific Scoop
• Image: My Catholic Faith Delivered

Sex and the Vatican: a secret journey in the reign of the chaste, will publish testimonies from priests and from undercover reporting. Carmelo Abbate, an investigative journalist, authored the book which will be published in Italian and French.

Abbate spent months undercover documenting a "hidden world" in which heterosexual priests have children with women who can never be their wives, and gay priests of many different nationalities visit nightclubs in Rome and pay for sex with escorts.

"Priests of all nationalities divide their time between Via della Conciliazione (the main road leading to St. Peter's basilica) and the party scene of Rome by night," the book's editors Piemme said in a press release.

Abbate said he is not anti-catholic or anti-clerical, but he aims to break the culture of secrecy surrounding the sex life of priests.

"The purpose of the book is not to shame Catholic clergy, it is to expose the hypocrisy and double standards of the Church," Mr Abbate, an award-winning investigative reporter, told The Daily Telegraph.

"There are priests with children but the kids cannot talk to their fathers in public for fear of their situation being discovered.

"There is a culture of 'omerta' (silence) in which the Church pretends not to know about any of this. If the authorities do find out, they just cover it up so as to avoid any scandal."

The book developed from an investigation conducted by Mr Abbate last year in which he used hidden cameras to film three priests attending gay nightspots in Rome and having casual sex, before donning their cassocks the next day and holding church services.

"At the time the Church said that these were just isolated incidents. I wanted to explore whether that was true and what I found was that the phenomenon is much, much wider," he said.

Women who become pregnant to a priest told Abbate they were forced to have an abortion, or have their child put up for adoption. Some priests pay ex-lovers hush money to keep the partner quiet, while others, on the quiet, support their children through school.

"For a lot of priests, the Church's teaching on sexual relations are a prison", Abbate said.

Sources

• The Telegraph
• Canada.com
• Image; The BS Report

Program's director, Joanne Cohen says Fiji has a high rate of sexually transmitted diseases.

Cohen told Radio Australia's Pacific Beat program that condoms are not widely used or accepted and the prgram was part of a plan to merge counselling with other services available to patients.

"What we've done to try and normalise the use of condoms...we've actually worked with the Ministry of Health in Fiji so that every woman that comes into a ministry of health facility they are given this opportunity for awareness, for discussion about condoms," she said.

The one-day training program was run by Pacific Counselling and Social Services, a non-government organisation in Suva.

Source:
Australia Network News