In her latest Huffington Post essay, poet and blogger Michele Madigan Somerville, who lives in Park Slope, reminisces about the time she heard Rev. Daniel Berrigan talk about reading The Bible. A gay man seated in front of her raised his hand to ask Berrigan about his Christian perspective on distribution of clean needles and condoms as means for preventing the spread of AIDS. According to Somerville, “Berrigan looked lovingly around the exquisite church sanctuary, paused to think, then said this: “Just because you can’t do everything … it doesn’t mean you have to do nothing.”” Here is an excerpt from her post, Condoms and the Pope:

I thought of that response Sunday morning as I read the New York Times’ account of the pope’s interview with German journalist and author Peter Seewald. According to the Times, Benedict has said that there may be circumstances in which the of use of a condom might not be “condemned by the Church.” According to the Times, the pope cited the example of a male prostitute as one such case: “There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility.”

At first, I found it hard to know what to make of this, but the more I thought about the pope’s statement, the more it struck me as maybe the first genuinely “pro-life” utterance to come out of his pontificate.

It may be that lives are saved as a result of these words, which is something.