Medical and theological experts advising the Pope have suggested that married couples could be allowed to use condoms when one of the spouses is HIV-positive or a drug user. Vatican watchers said that this would “open a small chink” in the Vatican’s uncompromising opposition to condoms.

There was no question of reversing the basic doctrine laid down in Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical in which Pope Paul VI rejected any relaxation of church rules on birth control. The policy was reiterated by Pope John Paul II and by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then his head of doctrine and now the pontiff.

According to the annual UN report on Aids, released yesterday before World Aids Day on December 1, there are almost 40 million people living with HIV. The most alarming increase was in Uganda, which experienced a rise from a 5.6 per cent infection rate among men and 6.9 per cent among women in 2000 to 6.5 per cent and 8.8 per cent respectively.

In a speech to African bishops last year Pope Benedict blamed contraception for a breakdown of sexual morality and said that abstinence and marital fidelity were the only effective way to prevent the spread of HIV.

Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, head of the Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care, said this week that a 200-page study on the spread of infectious diseases commissioned by the Pope in April had been completed. The cardinal said that the spread of Aids is something that worries the Pope a lot, but added that “no response from the Church can be one that encourages a libertine sexual attitude”.

Some leading Catholic liberals have advocated a policy change, describing condoms as the lesser evil in situations where there is “widespread misery, promiscuity or use of drugs”. These include Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the former Archbishop of Milan and once a contender for Pope, Monsignor George Cottier, a papal theologian, and Cardinal Godfried Danneels, of Belgium. Such voices are in a minority, however, in the current conservative Vatican climate.

Pope Benedict will meet the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, today before his controversial trip to Turkey next week. Yesterday the Pope announced that he would release the first volume of a study entitled Jesus of Nazareth early next year, saying: “I do not know how much time and strength remain to me.”

He said that the book was not a magisterial statement but a personal reflection, and readers were therefore at liberty to contradict him. The Pope, who will turn 80 next April, was the oldest cardinal to be made Pope for 275 years when elected in April last year.

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