April 18, 2005

White Smoke In Our Eyes

One week after Pope John Paul II, 84, died on April 2, a gushy NBC prime-time special, "Pope John Paul II, 1920--2005," proclaimed, “If there was a Ronald Reagan of Catholicism, this was the person.” In AIDS terms, the parallel was all too apt. Like the Gipper, JP failed to meet the terrible test of stopping HIV from becoming the greatest public-heath disaster in modern times. Still, most world media performed an instant canonization. The hagiographers didn’t mind the Pole’s staunch refusal to sanction condom use throughout his 26-year reign. During his tenure, AIDS killed nearly 30 million, ravaging the third-world nations he so pointedly embraced. Now, as ultraconservative German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 78, morphs into Pope Benedict XVI, AIDS activists are hoping to witness a miracle of sorts. For the first time since the epidemic hit, they can dream that the new pope will—against all evidence of his frequently self-proclaimed “fundamentalism”—poke holes in the Vatican’s anti-condom dogma, which holds that no action before, during or after sex can be used to prevent procreation.