It is being reported that the Vatican is saying that it is better to use condoms than to infect someone with HIV and kill them. I'm glad they are finally saying it - many of us have been thinking it since the mid-1980s. Among many, Michael Sean Winters writes about this in the National Catholic Reporter.
The birth control conversation, however, is not just about preventing disease. This Pope is taking the conversation on contraception back to where it should be and away from the absolutism where it has previously lived. More importantly, Caritas in Veritate emphasized how birth control is a capitulation to economic reality that no Catholic family need take. Economic reality must bend to procreation, not the other way around. The Church must always stand with the poor and their freedom to grow their families without starving, whether in the developing world or the Catholic middle class.
This is where I part company with the advocates of natural family planning, who seem to have no such qualms about telling families not to have more kids, but just by doing it the culturally approved Catholic way. Natural family planning should never be encouraged for economic reasons (that is a cop out to economic power) - it should only be used for health reasons - and I suspect if you make this leap, one can more easily see that the same motiviations make artificial birth control a less frightening moral concept - particularly in cases where another pregnancy could be deadly for the mother.
