Short Sharp Science:

According to reporters present at the time, it’s true. On a flight to Yaoundé in Cameroon, his first trip as pope to Africa, home of two-thirds of the world’s AIDS sufferers, Pope Benedict XVI really did say that AIDS is a “drama that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which on the contrary increase the problem.”

UNAIDS, the UN umbrella organization fighting the global AIDS pandemic, was quick to respond: “the male latex condom is the single, most efficient, available technology to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV.”

Is the pope from another planet? Is he stupid? Uneducated? No, obviously not. Does he know something we don’t? No. But that might not be so obvious to everyone.
The statement has been condemned by health officials worldwide. Preventing sexual transmission of the virus is crucial to preventing a vast acceleration of the AIDS pandemic.

People with HIV used to die after a few years. But now there are anti-HIV drugs, and poor Africans – the majority of infected people – are finally getting them. So now many live for decades – a medical triumph, a humanitarian victory, but also a vastly increased source of infection if those people don’t use condoms.

There is already far too much transmission. “In 2007, an estimated 2.7 million people became newly infected with HIV,” says UNAIDS. “About 45% of them were young people from 15 to 24 years old, with young girls at greater risk of infection than boys.”

Note the numbers. UNAIDS speaks on the basis of measurements, data, real facts out there in the real world. Scientists know condoms stop the virus being transmitted because they’ve made observations, from monitoring couples to watching whole countries like Thailand and Brazil slow the epidemic with condoms.

So on what basis is Benedict speaking? Doctrinal consistency. The Catholic Church believes that people must have sex only with their spouses, with no contraceptives, to leave open the chance of procreation. Besides, contraceptives encourage sex outside wedlock by minimising its consequences. So they have to insist that more condoms leads to more illicit sex and more AIDS.

Such medieval thinking is completely detached from the real world. If that was how human sexuality really happened, HIV would indeed never have got far. Adding condoms to a situation where people were just beginning to contemplate sex outside wedlock might indeed tip the balance fatally toward promiscuity.

But promiscuity is already happening, and shows no sign of letting up, as you’d think anyone listening inside confessionals would have noticed. Condoms are unlikely to add to it. But if there were more of them in Africa, that might help young women in Yaoundé who are not in a position to refuse sex. With a condom they might escape a fatal infection and a baby born with it. Any statement that leads to one more case like that might merit the kind of judgement that Pope Benedict has painted on his walls.

But like his predecessors – one of whom claimed that condoms had holes in that let HIV through – he is in a bind. His job is not to tell the scientific truth. It is to uphold doctrine. He’s unlikely to change now, as Vatican spokesmen have stressed.

But let us be clear. When the pope says condoms make AIDS worse, he doesn’t have access to secret facts. He’s just staying true to a well-known, if somewhat tortuous party line. The scientific facts say otherwise. Condoms stop HIV.

He probably means well. The pope went on, “in front of pain or violence, poverty or hunger, corruption or the abuse of power, a Christian cannot remain silent.”

Well, neither can a scientist.