A while ago, I pointed out the misunderstanding that links the Catholic Church’s moral position against condoms to a solitary decision of Pope Paul VI to promulgate Humanae Vitae.  Fr. Kevin Hegarty perpetuates the facile account of the Commission and the Pope in the Mayo News, along with a statement that, at the very least, assumes a dense intellect in Pope Benedict XVI:

…Brian Hall, President of the Australian AIDS Fund, a Catholic AIDS-care agency working in Malawi, wrote that ‘the Pope especially needs to recognise the paradigm shift in the use of condoms over the years. Initially, they were designed as a contraceptive device but, with the arrival of HIV/AIDS, they are a lifesaver as they block the transmission of a fatal disease.

Uh, just historically speaking, au contraire…

Even those who don’t like the Catholic Church’s morality should at least grant the probability that Pope Benedict is not an idiot.  If he continues to say that condoms are not the way to go, it might be because their use in free sexual intercourse is regarded as wrong even if they are used with only a prophylactic intentionality, or, as critics like to put it, when they are used to “affirm life, not avoid it.”

Again, as I mentioned, aside from contraceptive intent, the condom remains an instance of the sin against nature, which has been considered immoral by the Church from the beginning.  And not only by the Church; traditional Judaism had the same interpretation of the sin of Er and Onan:

Fundamental to the rabbinic legal position on contraception is the problem of hotza’at zera l’vattalah [improper emission of seed], known more commonly as hash-hatat zera…. So that its severity as a problem in connection with our subject may be appreciated at the outset, only the following need be noted: if a choice were to be made between so radical a procedure as sterilization, on the one hand, and the use of a device which may be said to thwart the normal course of seminal emission on the other, the former would entail far fewer legal difficulties. The touchstone for the acceptability of a birth control measure is the extent to which it runs afoul of the formidable prohibition of hash-hatat zera.

[from David. M. Feldman, Marital Relations, Birth Control and Abortion in Jewish Law (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 109. Reprinted as Birth Control in Jewish Law.]

And classic Protestantism held the same view.

The Pope is both custodian of the deposit of the Faith, and Supreme Pastor.  It’s his job to expound the moral law, even the natural moral law.  As the non-Catholic Mark Davis says so much better than I, what were people expecting?

What a paper-thin sham Catholicism would be if the pope were to cave and conclude: “You know those centuries we’ve spent teaching against anything that obstructs the sacred method by which life is created? Well, we’ve thought about it, and because millions are engaging in behavior that spreads a fatal disease, we’ve decided to shelve that basic belief and instruct people to do something we’ve considered a moral abomination pretty well forever.”

Anyone repelled by a pope who refuses to buckle this way should remember that no one is forced to be Catholic. If this bar is too high, there’s the door. But if Catholicism has withstood anything, it’s expectations that doctrine should bend to public will.