It's time for the BBC to catch up with the Pope, not the other way around

Here we go again. According to the BBC (who else?), the Pope is planning to reverse the Catholic Church's position on condoms and Aids "in Africa". Why on earth would be want to do that?

Certain people might consider applying some journalistic or scientific objectivity to the question of where in Africa the condom use relentlessly promoted by Western NGOs and compliant governments has ever arrested, never mind reversed, the rate of HIV infection. There is nowhere.

However, such a reversal is under way in Uganda, where the government's message is the same as the Catholic Church's: "Change Your Behaviour". Huge numbers of condoms have been distributed in Botswana, and the result has been for President Festus Mogae to declare, "Abstain or die". Who, exactly, is incapable of fidelity within a monogamous marriage and abstinence outside such a marriage? Women? Black people? Poor people? Developing-world people? Or just poor black women in the developing world?

And after those questions, certain people might examine the very high reliability of Natural Family Planning, as admitted even by the World Health Organisation (hardly a Vatican puppet, to say the very least). Who is incapable of the requisite discipline? See above? Or is it just that all women must poison themselves in order to be available constantly for the sexual gratification of men, much as people in emerging holiday resorts must carry condoms in order to be so available to Western sex tourists and, in point of fact, their diseases?

Why is it only ever the people who hardly consume anything who are told that there are too many of them, be they the people of the developing world abroad, or the working classes and the altogether excluded at home? And what are the implications of believing that the unborn child is both a part of a woman's body (of her very reproductive system, in fact), and at the same time insentient? They seem terrifying even here, never mind where female genital mutilation is endemic.