This is from the lead of the review:
There are now almost as many Catholics as citizens of China. Secularists might be surprised to learn that the Church is the largest single supplier of health care and education on the planet, the principal glue of civil society in Africa, the strongest bulwark of opposition to the caste system in India, and a leading player in global campaigns for sustainable living. It provides almost the only charitable presence in Chechnya, and other blackspots often forgotten by the rest of the world. Yet these marks of health contrast sharply with the often poor standard of the Church’s leadership. The anomaly is crystallized by the position of Catholic women. If access to education forms one of the most important strands in a girl’s advancement, then the Church gets a major part of the equation wholly right. At the same time, it makes a catastrophic mistake in continuing to teach that all artificial contraception is sinful. When the Pope spells out what he holds to be a corollary of this teaching – that the provision of condoms makes the spread of HIV more likely – then wrong-headedness shades into chronic irresponsibility.
... The Dawkins Delusion: Benedict XVI is 'stupid, ignorant or dim'.
Edward C Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Center at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, recently said: "The best evidence we have supports the Pope's comments." He added: "We have found no consistent associations between condom use and lower HIV infection rates, which, 25 years into the pandemic, we should be seeing if this intervention was working."
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