ONE OF THE crosses your average Catholic has to carry is defending the Pope’s position on contraception. I can’t count the times I’ve met some swivel-eyed atheist, who, when learning of my deprived, lapsed background, witters on about how backward his Holiness is when it comes to matters of the flesh, and how many millions of Africans are dying because of it.

This conversation serves two purposes: (1) my interrogator displays his profound social conscience; (2) he also shows how remarkably relaxed he is about sex. Unfortunately, he’s wrong. Even more unfortunately, so is Benedict XVI, if reports that he is about to change the Church’s longstanding policy on contraception are true.

The signs are grim: the head of the Vatican council for health and pastoral care has confessed that a study that allows some loopholes has not only been commissioned but is about to be published. I hope the Pope tells him it’s bull.

The “saving the Africans” argument can be swiftly dispensed with. Simply put, if people only ever had unprotected sex within marriage, there would be very little HIV anywhere. Indeed, Africa would be better off if there were more Catholics there: South Africa has only 6 per cent Catholics, with a 22 per cent infection rate; Uganda is 43 per cent Catholic, with an infection rate of 4 per cent.

The other, more insidious argument is that condoms are justifiable on grounds of self-defence. As Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragàn put it: “If an infected husband wants to have sex with his wife who isn’t infected, she must defend herself by any means necessary.”

You get to wonder whom these red hats have been listening to. Andrea Dworkin? After all, if condoms can be justified thus, then what is so special about HIV that doesn’t apply to chlamydia and syphilis? Aren’t non-marrieds allowed to defend themselves too? By playing the self-defence gambit, the Church will have lost its strongest card — that sex is something a couple do together — and sold out to the mad feminists and Barbara Cartland conservatives, who believe that sex is something ghastly that men do to women.

For most godless, bourgeois types throughout the Western world, the Catholic Church’s unique selling point is being anti-contraception. Without this, it will become just another collection of weirdos like the C of E. Is that what liberals want?