THE INDEPENDENT: From offending Jews and Muslims to saying condoms could make Africa's Aids crisis worse, Benedict XVI appears destined to blunder
On his first pontifical visit to Africa this week, Pope Benedict XVI set off another storm of controversy when he said that condoms were not only not the solution to the continent's Aids crisis but that they actually "make matters worse".
It was just the latest in an endless succession of high-profile gaffes that have made the brainiest pope of modern times also by a wide margin the most accident-prone.
In previous pratfalls the Bavarian theologian has welcomed back into the Church a bishop who flatly denies the existence of the Nazi gas chambers, refused to sign UN declarations on the rights of homosexuals and the disabled, denied the possibility of inter-religious dialogue after praying in a mosque, insulted Muslims en masse, and failed to mention the Jews while visiting Auschwitz.
Benedict's gaffes are becoming as frequent and predictable as Silvio Berlusconi's. And while Joseph Ratzinger has never cultivated the image of clown and raconteur so dear to the Italian PM, there is something else that the two men share: they wait for the grand occasion, when the world is hanging on their words, to drop their peculiar bombshells.
It was always going to be interesting to hear what Berlusconi had to say, standing alongside Russia's President Medvedev, about newly-elected President Obama. Berlusconi picked that moment to say that Obama "has a good tan". He chose the spotlight of a joint press conference to tell President Sarkozy, sotto voce but audibly, that Carla Bruni was his personal gift to the Frenchman.
Likewise, Pope Benedict picked his first trip to Africa to drop his condom bomb. Given the huge amount of flak the Church has received from Aids campaigners over the years for its failure to endorse the use of condoms in any circumstances, even within a marriage in which one partner is infected, this was not a subject that the pontiff could ignore. >>> By Peter Popham in Rome | Thursday, March 19, 2009
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