But we are not talking about the marriage bed here, and we are not talking about teenagers fooling around in the back seat of a car.
We are talking about a continent that has 67 percent of the world's AIDS cases and has endured 75 percent of the world's AIDS deaths, according to the World Health Organization.
It is a continent in which one of the favored safeguards against HIV infection is forceable sex with young virgins. A continent where rape is a weapon of war. A continent where men infected with the virus infect their wives and their other partners with impunity.
Africa is a continent in which abstinence, fidelity and the use of condoms - or any one of these disciplines - is devoutly to be wished for but almost completely unheard of.
The international response to the pope's statements was barely concealed fury.
"To say that condoms could worsen the problem, presumably by encouraging people to go out and have more sex is empirically wrong," wrote the editors of the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.
The paper added that preaching abstinence-only in a poor and war-torn continent is "quixotic at best, and downright dangerous at worst."
The pope is right in the same way that parents are right when they tell their children that abstinence is the only way to absolutely prevent pregnancy and disease. But the circumstances in Africa are so compelling as to make such a comparison intolerable, and Pope Benedict's blunt statement of adherence to church dictum has lethal consequences.
More than 28 percent of African children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. And the church still proscribes the use of condoms when one partner in a marriage is infected and the other is not.
I understand that condoms are a symbol of a culture of sexual license and that the only discernible challenge to this culture right now is the stalwartness of Catholic doctrine. But at what point does human life trump religious dogma for this pope and the Catholic Church?
The use of condoms in Africa is no longer about birth control or about placing an artificial barrier between God and the gift of life.
In Africa, condoms are a public health instrument in the fight against death.
