Pope Benedict and Condoms: What He Did and Did Not Say Over the weekend, L'Osservatore Romano , the newspaper of Vatican City (not, as some like to say, "the Pope's own newspaper"), broke the embargo on publishing excerpts from Light of the World ( compare prices ), a book-length interview of Pope Benedict XVI conducted by his longtime interlocutor, German journalist Peter Seewald. In so doing, L'Osservatore Romano set off a firestorm that will almost certainly guarantee that the book, which goes on sale today, will become a best-seller. Around the world, headlines implied (and sometimes more than implied) that Pope Benedict had changed the Catholic Church's longstanding opposition to artificial contraception . The most restrained headlines still declared that the Pope had proclaimed that the use of condoms was "morally justified" or at least "permissible" to try to stop the spread of HIV, the virus generally acknowledged as the primary cause of AIDS. While I think that Thompson's analysis is more right than wrong -- many conservative Catholic commentators, especially in the United States, tried to explain away the Pope's comments, and failed -- I think that Thompson himself goes too far when he writes, "I simply don't understand how Catholic commenters can maintain that the Pope did not say that condoms may be justified, or permissible, in circumstances where not using them would spread HIV." The problem, on both sides, comes from taking a very specific case that falls entirely outside the Church's teaching on artificial contraception and