A powerful Vatican cardinal who nearly became pope last year has taken the radical position of saying it might be okay to use a condom -- but only with your spouse, and only if your spouse has AIDS, and only if you haven't caught the disease yet.
Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini's comments are seen by Vatican experts as being crazily liberal, because the official Holy See rule is that condoms can never be used.
Bible scholars have long been confused by the Vatican's strict stance on rubbers, because there's nothing in the Bible about condoms.
The Church is so furiously anti-condom that it actually runs a global disinformation campaign to try to convince people that condoms offer no protection against sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS.
AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it surfaced in the 1980s and more than 40 million are currently infected, mostly in Africa. But Vatican officials say 25 million corpses and 11 million "AIDS orphans" is nothing compared to the make-believe sin of somebody using a condom.
Historians note that the Catholic Church has a well-documented reputation for just making stuff up, such as its rule that priests be celibate or the weird proclamation that Mary Magdalene -- the "Bride of Christ" and "Apostle to the Apostles" -- was actually a dirty whore!
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