Lent. Time was it was a period during which you could buy your black babies. I was the proud possessor of at least two of them, though it could have been as many as six, writes Mary Raftery.
They were all dutifully paid for by the assiduous collection of silver paper, the wrappings from sweets and toffee bars - Trigger bars stick in the mind for some reason.
I was six, and determined to accumulate as many of the little darlings as I could.
The nuns were most accommodating, handing out little cards with a blurred picture of an African infant, your very own forever. Except that it was the same photograph on each card, which long left me with a distinct feeling of being cheated.
Times have moved on, and definitely improved. No more sales of babies, although the child sponsorship tactics of some aid agencies (not Catholic, I hasten to add) are not a million miles away. The Irish Catholic Church now focuses its international aid operation through the highly-respected organisation Trócaire. And Lent belongs to Trócaire. Collection boxes are everywhere, and we are in the midst of an enormous campaign focusing on Trócaire's work in Rwanda. Lent is a time when other aid agencies seem to back off, leaving the fund-raising field to the bishops' own agency.
The reality, however, is that Trócaire now faces a moral dilemma of enormous proportions, which so far it has refused to confront.
We live in a world where the stated policy of the Catholic Church is actually killing people by the millions. The Vatican cardinal heading up the Pontifical Council for the Family (Alfonso Lopez Trujillo) has stated categorically that it is a scientific fact that the HIV virus is so small that it can pass through microscopic pores in condoms. Consequently, aside from any moral arguments, condoms should not be used as they provide no protection against the virus.
It would be difficult to overstate the disastrous consequences of this particularly evil piece of disinformation. That it is palpably false has been demonstrated scientifically over and over again.
However, on the ground across Africa and Latin America, bishops, priests and lay Catholics spread these flagrant lies to people whose lives depend on the truth about AIDS. The Archbishop of Nairobi, Raphael Ndingi Nzeki, has claimed that condoms help to spread HIV. "Every condom sold sends the buyer to acquire the AIDS virus," proclaimed Ugandan priest Father Gerald Magera Iga in a campaign urging condom sellers to burn up their stocks.
These view are not supported by any of the major international organisations working desperately to slow the spread of a disease which is threatening the stability of entire continents. Nor are they supported by the Irish Government, which signed up recently to the international declaration produced after the major Dublin summit on AIDS, which includes the promotion and distribution of condoms as a priority.
There is in fact so much international consensus on the value of condom promotion as part (but only a part) of a strategy to prevent HIV/AIDS, that even some Catholic bishops have broken ranks with the Vatican.
All state that abstinence from sex is preferable. However, a report from the French Catholic hierarchy stated that condom use for HIV positive people during sex is "necessary". South African Bishop Kevin Dowling states that "people who are living with the HI virus must be invited and challenged to take responsibility for their actions and their effect on others, and should use a condom in order to prevent the transmission of potential death to another".
Tragically, his views have been rejected by the South African Conference of Bishops, who continue to bury their heads in the sand while people die all around them.
Most recently, Cardinal Gotfried Danneels of Belgium, viewed as a possible successor to Pope John Paul, stated that failure to use a condom when someone who was HIV positive did have sex was sinful, a contravention of the sixth commandment: thou shalt not kill.
So where does Trócaire stand in all of this? After all, that organisation has always prided itself that it works on the ground in developing countries through local partnerships with either government or community-based groups. Because of this, it is ideally placed to counteract the Vatican's lethal propaganda.
Trócaire makes it clear that in common with other Catholic aid agencies it does not support or fund organisations which either promote or distribute condoms for disease prevention. It must also be said that to its enormous credit Trócaire has taken a lead within the Catholic aid community internationally to assist HIV/AIDS sufferers and to campaign for access to affordable drugs for AIDS patients.
But is this good enough? As the Catholic Church's moral arguments against condom use for disease prevention are increasingly exposed as fatuous, the Vatican has concocted its deadly and lying propaganda campaign to make people believe that condoms do not prevent HIV transmission anyway. Countless lives are at stake here. It is time that Trócaire and the Irish bishops took sides.