Killer Pope?

Tech Central Station has a smart article about the wild allegations that JPII is a mass murderer for his stance on condoms in Africa. Link. Excerpts:

Nicholas Kristof, of the New York Times, says that the Vatican's rejection of condoms has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, making it one of "its most tragic mistakes in the first two millennia of its history." The influential New Statesman, in London, ran a cover story shortly after the Pope's death claiming that he "probably contributed more to the continental spread of [AIDS] than the trucking industry and prostitution combined."

Rosemary Neill, of The Australian, in Sydney, opined that the intransigent Vatican "will eventually be accused of crimes against humanity." Polly Toynbee, of the UK's Guardian newspaper -- who clearly had something quite vile for breakfast that morning -- compared JP2 to Lenin: "they both put extreme ideology before human life and happiness, at unimaginable human cost." Even doctors chimed in. The world's leading medical journal, The Lancet, accused an ignorant and rigid Pope of presenting "insuperable obstacles to the prevention of disease." . . .

The campaign to blacken the name of John Paul II with African deaths is so blazingly and bewilderingly brainless that it amounts to conclusive proof of Orwell's maxim. What could possibly be behind it?

There is a political answer. A slick campaign to discredit the Pope and the traditional teachings of their Church has been operational for several years. A pro-abortion rights group called Catholics for a Free Choice (CFC) launched an international PR drive in December 2001 to promote their view that "good Catholics use condoms." Advertisements in the US, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, Kenya, Chile and Zimbabwe were intended to mark "the first phase of an effort to change the Vatican's policy and challenge its aggressive lobbying against availability and access to condoms in areas of the world most at risk." Subsequent media coverage, at least in the UK, has reflected the major themes of CFC's ideology.

But on a deeper level, Catholic beliefs about sexuality clash with what John Paul II called a "pathology of the spirit." As an example of this, take Polly Toynbee's claim that "contraception is women's true saviour." The Pope looked to a different saviour. He knew that technology cannot repair the wounded human condition. It cannot inject self-restraint; it cannot infuse respect for others; it cannot manufacture a sense of responsibility. The only lasting salvation comes not from a pill or a latex tube but from a conversion of heart. A technical patch will leave Africa's acute problems of gender inequality, poverty, low education and social disruption unsolved. And without fixing these, the AIDS problem is sure to get worse.