I saw the headline today, “Vatican Rethinks Condom Ban” in the NYT, and I about shit my pants. Until I got to the second paragraph:

Church officials recently confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI had requested a report on whether it might be acceptable for Catholics to use condoms in one narrow circumstance: to protect life inside a marriage when one partner is infected with H.I.V. or is sick with AIDS.

That’s it. Condoms might only be permissible for Catholics if one of the parties has AIDS. And also they’re married. Which begets (pun intended) a host of other questions:

As far as I’m aware, the official church position is that sex is only acceptable for reproductive purposes. And since you effectively eliminate the possibility of conception when using a rubber, no married couple, anywhere, ever, has any business using a condom.

“Putting on a condom is clearly something someone chooses,” the Rev. Thomas Berg, an ethicist and executive director of the Westchester Institute, an institute for Catholic studies in New York, said by e-mail. “And to do so in sexual relations, even if one’s purpose is not to contracept, but merely to stop the spread of disease, one would still be opting for something that drastically disorders those sexual relations. And this, the church has taught to be immoral.”

So what is the acceptable church position? You know, the non-contradictory one?

Father Berg said he believed that in the end, Benedict would make no changes but use the debate to “vigorously re-endorse ethically acceptable answers to the AIDS crisis, namely, the virtue of chastity and abstinence.”

And for a minute there, I really thought the Catholic Church had taken a step out of the dark ages.