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Laws of Forbidden Places

Benedict XVI is in the middle of a week-long trip to Africa, his first visit to the continent as pope.

There are many issues in African Christianity that are fascinating and worthwhile, from the church’s social advocacy on corruption and governance, to the continent’s evangelical religious upheaval. But you probably will not be hearing about them. No — the media coverage of Benedict’s Africa visit will revolve mostly around one thing: condoms.

The Vatican’s position on artificial contraception, elaborated in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, is one of the Catholic Church’s most enduringly unpopular dogmas. From a public-relations point of view, the church’s take on condoms is the Catholic equivalent of Bible-thumpers’ creationist weirdness. Both viewpoints are, to the average semi-rational Westerner, some combination of unjustifiably absolutist and embarrassingly backward. As a French NGO worker in Cameroon, where Benedict arrived Tuesday, quipped, “Is the pope living in the 21st century?”

“One teacher said to me, ‘We’ve been trying to book Ten Ten Theatre for years’.  So I told her that can’t be right.  We’ve only been touring schools for less than a year!”

Anecdotes such as this are testament to the impact that Ten Ten Theatre has had in schools over the past few months.  Described as a theatre-in-education company with an underlying Catholic ethos, the company has been formed over many years by its founder and Artistic Director, Martin O’Brien:

“I was a professional actor for many years and in between jobs I did some work at the SPEC Centre in the Westminster Diocese.  SPEC encouraged me to write and produce theatre for young people and this provided a great opportunity to develop this kind of work.”