Religion: Condoms, Cont'd.

When U.S. Roman Catholic bishops last year cautiously accepted public information campaigns about condoms to limit AIDS, the Vatican hit the Sistine ceiling. The text is being rewritten. Now Rome has another reason to be vexed, this time by the words of one of its favored churchmen. In a TV show on AIDS, the leading figure of the church in France, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, generally considered a pro-papal conservative, dutifully defended the church's moral tenets. But then Lustiger, who was appointed Archbishop of Paris by Pope John Paul II in 1981, added that those "who carry the virus and cannot live in chastity ((should)) use the proposed methods." That clearly meant condoms, though Lustiger did not utter the word. Last week in L'Express, he repeated his view. The Vatican made no immediate response, but one Roman official deemed the Cardinal's lesser-of-two-evils approach "reprehensible."